So an IDE is a code editor that ships with an LSP server, not just an LSP interface? (Doesn’t have to be LSP as such but “stuff that an LSP server does”).
Text Editor: just writes text, no formatting (other than line endings)
Code Editor: A family Text Editors that have additional capabilities such as syntax highlighting. And optionally a plugin or extension ecosystem. (VSCode, vim family, Emacs, even gedit )
IDE: An application that includes Code Editor functionality, but also includes tools for a building on given tech stack. This comes out of the box, are a “part of” the application, are peers to the code editor, and cannot be removed, but can optionally be extended through plugins or extensions.
I would say that an IDE is something that includes build/run tools integrated into it. Everything else is just a text editor. (But that’s just my opinion of course)
To expand on my point, I don’t think it makes sense to call vs code an integrated development environment if it doesn’t actually have the environment integrated.
Visual studio and idea would be examples of IDEs, they actually have all of the tools and frameworks needed to run the languages they were built for out of the box.
You can’t run node or python out of the box with just vs code for example, without their respective tooling, all vscode can do is edit the code and editing code is not functionally different from editing any other text.
So I maintain that both vim and vscode are text editors and not IDEs
So an IDE is a code editor that ships with an LSP server, not just an LSP interface? (Doesn’t have to be LSP as such but “stuff that an LSP server does”).
My understanding has always been:
Text Editor: just writes text, no formatting (other than line endings)
Code Editor: A family Text Editors that have additional capabilities such as syntax highlighting. And optionally a plugin or extension ecosystem. (VSCode, vim family, Emacs, even gedit )
IDE: An application that includes Code Editor functionality, but also includes tools for a building on given tech stack. This comes out of the box, are a “part of” the application, are peers to the code editor, and cannot be removed, but can optionally be extended through plugins or extensions.
I would say that an IDE is something that includes build/run tools integrated into it. Everything else is just a text editor. (But that’s just my opinion of course)
To expand on my point, I don’t think it makes sense to call vs code an integrated development environment if it doesn’t actually have the environment integrated.
Visual studio and idea would be examples of IDEs, they actually have all of the tools and frameworks needed to run the languages they were built for out of the box.
You can’t run node or python out of the box with just vs code for example, without their respective tooling, all vscode can do is edit the code and editing code is not functionally different from editing any other text.
So I maintain that both vim and vscode are text editors and not IDEs
Vocode integrates consoles for whatever you want. I use node and sql all the time.
I’d say build and run tools are pretty integrated into vim. Type
:makand there you go, it’s not like vs studio would be a single process either.For me a web app IDE includes a DB manger, HTML previewer, etc.
A text editor edits text, an IDE is an Environment that Integrates Development tools.