The Best IDE in the World

First of all, I apoligize for the lack of recent posts. Brushing up things for the Qualys Security Conference took all my free time away for the past 3 weeks. I really want to get back on “the one quality post per week” rhythm so expect more things coming your way in the future!

One of my most memorable experiences in software development occured to me about 8 years ago when I started working for Airbus. I was fresh out of college, all pumped up with my master’s degree in network engineering. I had been swimming in code for the past 15 years (though it was mostly self-learning and small hobby projects) and therefore thought firmly with boasting over-confidence that I was an amazing coder. The truth is… I was clueless about how to produce great, maintainable code. The main issue with someone that is overcome with pride is that it always finds itself faultless, rejecting any type of failure onto something or someone else. For me, 8 years ago, it was always Eclipse’s fault.

In an effort to trend towards open-source usage and cost reduction, Airbus had started shifting most of their software development from C++ and VB/C# to the Java world. Most of the code and testing was also slowly shifting from internal development to outsourcing. I entered Airbus in that period of transition, and downloaded Eclipse for the very first time in 2006.

As an advocate of Microsoft products, Visual Studio was to me the pinacle of the IDEs, making the transition to Eclipse incredibly painful. It was slow: autocomplete would take multiple seconds, it would often freeze… The integration with maven was never working. The layout was awkward. Spell-checking ON but line numbers OFF as defaults?! I was repulsed by it. Everything about it made me feel like it was created at the time when dinosaurs were still on the earth. I hated it with my life. In fact, I hated my job for having to use Eclipse. I was a miserable coder who knew deep inside that it was all Eclipse’s fault. I thought that things would get better with the days, but they didn’t. I kept dreaming about creating the site three years before it was even born.

Two weeks had passed, and then came along Ludo, a whiz kid about 5 years older than me down the hall from me. He had heard me curse at the IDE and asked if he could help. I replied with assurance: “Pff there’s nothing anyone can do about it, it’s just Eclipse who’s being a piece of *junk* once again. I’ll fix it.”. He then asked: “What do you mean once again?” after which I started a 10 minutes whining about how awful Eclipse was and how slow it made me as a coder. I was trying to fix a bug and Eclipse was just throwing random errors.

He listened carefully and then asked if he could take a look at the issue at hand. He picked up a chair and I gave him my mouse and keyboard. Ludo then started typing extremely fast, opening up the preferences, changing a bunch of options, tweaking memory usage, server settings, etc. His hands never left the keyboard. All of a sudden everything on my computer, Eclipse included, seemed so fluid, so fast and so responsive. For each specific action, Ludo knew the exact procedure, the right shortcut. The dialogs would open up and close within seconds. Within a few minutes, he had identified the issue, fixed it, tested it and commited the fix. Before leaving, he said: “Eclipse is just another tool. They are only as sharp as you decide them to be.”

I was blown away and became transformed by that experience. Back with my keyboard and mouse, Eclipse seemed slow again, but now I knew that if I learned how to use the tool well, it could be extremely powerful and fast. And not just Eclipse, but every other tool as well! My OS, my text editor, my browser… Everytime I went back to Ludo’s desk, he was only working through emacs and a linux terminal, something I had never thought possible before. But he had mastered those 2 tools to perfection and was faster at producing efficient code using them than with any other tool.

With the years, I have come to master a small number of tools. For example I know all the shortcuts in Photoshop, I am fluent in Visual Studio, I never use the mouse in Eclipse, I use my own Sublime Text plugins and hand-made extensions in Chrome’s dev console. Just like learning to play an instrument, mastering any tool is hard and requires dedication and a lot of time. I have tweaked Eclipse and Visual Studio in so many ways that not a lot of people can use my instances without feeling that they are a bit awkward. I have modified/treasured the tools in a way that they have become a part of me as a coder. I improved my typing so that I could be fully efficient in both french and english using any type of keyboard layout. And with the years, I have come to the conclusion that one of the best ways to become a better coder is to learn to master the tools that you use. And this is not a learn-everything-in-24-hours type of thing.

Even today we still see a lot of open debates about Eclipse vs Netbeans vs IntelliJ, about .net vs java, about rails vs django vs laravel, the eternal conflict of PC vs Mac, etc. And seeing a title like “the best [insert any word here] in the world” is enough to bring people to frenetic behaviour. To those who seek which tool is better, I want to quote again from the amazing and inspirational coder I met at Airbus 8 years ago: “Tools are only as sharp as you decide them to be”. Now pick an IDE, a browser, an editor that you feel good with, and go master it. Make it your own. Make it the best tool in the world.

37 thoughts on “The Best IDE in the World

  1. Dude, you’re missing one main point – it is not about extensibility BUT usability.

    i.e. I don’t want to spend months for fine tuning IDE – it should be *mostly* great out of the box. C++: MSVC + Visual Assist. C#: MSVC [+Resharper], etc..

    So no, I don’t want to spend time writing my plugins for sublime, emacs, etc…

    • Well, most famous tools today are pretty much great out of the box I think. I’ve worked with IntelliJ, Eclipse and Netbeans and I find all 3 great, customizable tools. I took a lot of time making Eclipse my home but I think I could have done the same with any other editor. For C#, there are not that many options: MonoDevelop and Visual Studio + Reshaper. But still, you could use Visual Studio + Reshaper out of the box and still be 5 times less efficient than someone who has mastered the tool inside out. So it’s not so much about the tool than about what you make of it.

      You’re stating ST as an example. Aren’t you using any plugins? Have you ever opened the package explorer and installed custom things? Sure I’m efficient with an out-of-the-box Sublime. But I become a ninja with my own Sublime with all of its plugins, snippets, macros. 🙂

      Thanks for reading!

      • I mentioned Sublime as an example of highly customizable editor, but you’re right. It is mostly a good editor with more or less good enough existing plugins.

        • I work in Aero at BAE (Mostly Boeing Commercial) and I was showing a college some regex magic to do a complicated replace in Sublime Text 3 just yesterday and it blew her mind. I did not use anything but Cnt-H with an out of the box setup (some downloaded packages). I have not come across another editor I like that can do multiline regular expression block replacements. I use multiple editors depending on what I am doing but I find I reach for Sublime more and more. I have been doing development for 10 years and I am amazed at the power of Sublime to do “text” editing.

          • Which is great, and you will do this once every two years or you have some other really weird stuff going on with your code. I’m always amazed when people talk about how awesome an IDE based on some esoteric aspect. I have awesome command line tools that can easily do one off search and replaces in a code base. I recently started using PHPStorm for PHP development and I was amazed at the number of features it had related to things I do every day even simple things like highlighting unused variables.

      • “Lots of options” is not a good thing on itself, if all the options suck.

        The 3 Java IDEs suck equally, when compared to Visual Studio.

  2. This is such a terrible view.

    The problem with “mastering the tool” is that the lifetime of the tool is unknown and translatability of the knowledge is equally uncertain. Becoming an expert of tools essentially means that you have invested excessive amounts of time learning this tool rather than learning some deeper knowledge (i.e. better software design principles).

    This is of course more a matter of shades of grey rather than black or white. For example, programming languages disappear as well but you have to use at least one. The difference is that a solid computer science education enables you to learn any programming language, and it should not take more than a month of full time programming until you are productive in a new language.

    Knowledge of emacs does however not translate to neither vim nor eclipse and vice versa. The same can be said of photoshop, paint and maya. Latex and Word are thoroughly different.

    Overinvesting time in learning these tools is a real personal risk. Yes, of course it makes perfect sense to become better at the tools we use to produce but to go from that statement to claiming we should just accept any tool and “master” it. The advice should be to reject any tool that requires you to master it in order to be productive.

    • I so disagree. How can you be productive without hotkeys?

      Answer: you can’t. And learning like 20-30 hotkeys makes *ALL* the difference. And that; unfortunately takes time.

      The good news? You make all that time back once you master it. I knew this already, but I got it confirmed to myself when I picked up VIM, and used a few months to become fairly accomplished in it.

      • PS: For Java Developers who need Eclipse’s refactor tools AND want Vim bindings, there is a nice plugin for eclipse called VRapper.

        It boosted my productivity by at least 25%


      In my experience, it takes a few hours a day for less than a week to become pretty fast with most tools. The productivity boost pays for itself within two months. So even if everything I learn about Vim/Eclipse/NetBeans/gEdit becomes useless within a year, it’s still worth my time.

    • @Mikael: you’re expressing a very limited view. You can’t be a great craftsman without mastering your tools. Good tools are extensible, and timeless. Vim is what now, 30 years old? People still use it, and still learn it! I learned vim about 5 years ago, and have been using it (very happily) as my main text editor ever since.

      If your tools change every 4 months, you’re doing something wrong.

      You might as well refuse to learn any programming language deeply because languages “keep changing” and “new languages keep popping up”.

  3. I will share your story with the world, my friend. This should be read in every introductory Programming / Computer Science course IMO. In hindsight, the level of technological bigotry that exists in the software realm is unbelievable. We should master what we like, and appreciate others expertise instead of criticizing their choices.

    Though, it already seems that the frenetic people that you are referring to have already jumped on the opportunity to tell you why you are wrong.

    • @Alec: it’s actually quite the opposite: it’s about stopping to make excuses (e.g. “crappy software”) and learning to use what you have to the utmost.

  4. It’s surprising to note that even large companies such as Airbus are thinking about cost reduction and favoring, open-source software, which can have potential vulnerabilities, which a malicious user can easily exploit.

  5. This is exactly right.

    On reddit, when someone re-asks the regular question “what’s the best text editor?” I invariably answer “the one that doesn’t get in your way”.

    If you can code like a demon on crack in notepad, then notepad is the best text editor *for you*.

    Conversely, if you assigned an editor, then you better *make* it work for you.I mean if you have no choice and you’re stuck rowing a boat in the rain, then you better figure out how to row that boat the best you can. Complaining about the rain doesn’t get the rowing done.

  6. I suppose, with enough effort, you can learn to make a VW bug drive like a Ferrari.

    It would probably be easier to start out with a Ferrari.

  7. Guess what, you can write an IDE from scratch, and even design a programming language from scratch, “to make it your own”.

    I guess no one has the means to do that, so a logical person will seek the best tool already available at the market.

    You don’t grow your own wheat, right? You don’t have your own power station, correct?
    Software tools are no different. Chose the already best, and further customize it to your needs.

    But guess what, there is a *best*, given certain needs and prerequisites. There are tools which are better than others for any given task.

  8. I’ll adhere to the grey area described in some comments.

    I understand that most of us *SHOULD* be familiar with shortcuts and productivity “boosters” like macros and boilerplate generators. But most of the time, this repetitive work should let us know that we’re missing some key refactoring to lower our copy-paste activity.
    I worry about programmers that feel productivity is typing fast. Usually problems take 80% of thinking time and 20% of typing time.
    I’d rather follow Pareto’s rule on this one.

  9. Thanks for taking the time and sharing this gem, Nicolas. You are quite right, there will never be a perfect OS/IDE/programming language, and it is down to each of us to make it as effective as possible.

  10. I came here expexting something like… Best browser is… But found a conclusion i could agree with 🙂

    Lovely post, enjoyed reading it !

  11. Very well said.
    I totally agree, that instead of spending more time on which tool is better, I should spend more time improving my skills with the tool that I use.

    Thank you very much. 😀

  12. Good article. I agree with the idea of focus on specific tools. It does not take too long to learn a set of keyboard shortcuts, and, I’ve got a ton of scripts I created a long, long time ago, which are still useful today.

    Sometimes it’s indeed irritating when a tool goes out of fashion or dies from lack of developer support, or perhaps due to the company selling it going bankrupt.

  13. All I read is the coAll I read was comparison between hammering a nail with a Rock and a Hammer. While stating that you can achieve the same result with rock. Indeed you can, but regardless you will have higher failure state with it, then with hammer.

  14. So how does one teach eclipse not to validate the contents of node_modules folders. There are like 5 different places in the preferences where you can exclude these but eclipse still gets stuck parsing and validating the contents of node_modules.

    • @Patrick try to mark the folder as derived. (I think it’s PackageExplorer>Select Folder, ⌘+I to bring up properties, check Derived attribute)

  15. Why don’t you tell us what are those magic settings that make Eclipse good?

    Where is the setting for “Stop freezing ramdomly”?

    Where is the setting for “Stop giving errors when importing projects that I know for sure that Maven accepts”?

    Where is the setting for “Scroll wheel scrolls the pane under it”?

    Where is the setting for “Don’t show errors until you are damn sure they really exist”? I’m tired of trying to fix things that magically work after a clean rebuild or in a clean workspace.

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