College coding lab in Phoenix made me ditch IDEs for good

I was in room 204 of the engineering building at ASU last semester when my Python IDE crashed for the third time during a midterm. The TA just shrugged and said to use the terminal instead, which felt like a punishment at first. But after wrestling with Vim for 45 minutes, I actually finished the problem set faster than my classmates who were still waiting for their fancy editors to load. Anybody else have a moment where a basic tool saved you when the big stuff failed?

3 comments

3 Comments

jamienguyen1mo ago

Sat in a similar spot last year when my laptop battery gave out during a group project and I couldn't even open Sublime Text. Had to borrow a friend's old Chromebook with nothing but a terminal and a text editor that barely did syntax highlighting. Ended up writing all my code in nano, which was honestly kind of freeing once I got past the initial panic. Your mileage may vary, but there's something about being forced into a stripped down setup that makes you actually think about the code instead of relying on autocomplete and linting to catch your mistakes. Still use VS Code for most stuff now, but I keep a terminal window open on the side just in case things go sideways.

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aaron7081mo ago

That's a really solid point about nano though... people hate on it but when you're in a pinch it gets the job done. I had a similar moment last year when my main dev machine just refused to boot and I had to SSH into a Raspberry Pi I'd set up as a backup. No GUI, no fancy plugins, just vim and a terminal. @jamienguyen you're right about it changing how you approach problems. Without all the handholding you start actually reading error messages instead of just clicking through them and hoping for the best. I still keep a minimal config on my current setup just to remember what it feels like.

the_jordan1mo ago

Has anyone else noticed how these stripped-down setups actually make you better at reading documentation? When I was stuck on that Chromebook with nano I spent like 30 minutes reading man pages for commands I'd been copy-pasting for years. Suddenly understood what all those flags actually did instead of just treating them like magic incantations. Kinda makes you wonder how much muscle memory we've built around stuff we don't really understand.