"I don't need a heavy IDE. I just need a good text editor"

What even is the distinction anymore? I use VSCode and I use Eclipse. At least as far as i can see they are damn near equivalent. Is there really such an important distinction?

If you've programmed in a language like C or C++ you should know the diffrence.
A text editor is just an editor to edit text.
An IDE promotes the idea of not having to switch to anything else from code inception to compiling.
So IDE != text editor.

It's not about importance but about functionality, with an iDE you can generate code, you can observe the behaviour of your program very closely, you have lots of tools to help you debug, insert breakpoints and such, you can't do all of these things with a text editor (You are right about VSCode though that you could call it an IDE with all that functionality, that's what I don't get too about VSCode, it's practically a lightweight IDE or something like that)

@rootshell VSCode comes complete with a debugger and terminal plus plugins for days if you need more. Press F5 and you run your C# app in VSCode just as you would in Visual Studio. You can even manage database connections and such. What's the big difference ?

@catintroholic Debugger seems to be the main difference you're pointing to. Idk if all the modern text editors have them but I know vscode does by default and I'm pretty sure I've seen the capability to insert breakpoints in atom (I could be wrong) which would suggest at least the ability to integrate a debugger. Code completion and syntax checking are also readily available. I don't think I've ever seen eclipse style "generate getters and setters" but snippets are available to generate code. And I wouldn't doubt it if there was a plugin to extract methods or constants for "insert language here"

I crashed when I read Eclipse 😞

@gitpush you must have had intellij open☺

@tevyt hahahaha yup yup 😂