Why Would Developers Use a Text Editor Instead of an IDE?

When one thinks of CAD developers or engineers working on projects, typically one thinks of the high-end software and hardware they would be using. Much as one wouldn’t expect to see those type of programmers using low-end software tools, you also wouldn’t expect professional web app programmers using basic text editors–but they often do.


With the increasing promotion of web-based tools that work through cloud services, many companies, such as Microsoft and Google–to name two of the largest–are talking about the use of such cloud- and browser-based tools by developers and programmers. Although it’s a nice concept, an integrated development environment (IDE) was designed to allow programmers to work within a local environment that was created with a specific language (or languages) in mind. Text editors were designed with one purpose in mind–to work with text.

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