Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Know what you want.

PHPStorm is an IDE. It can be used as a simple editor but compared to the other it sucks at it, very clunky.

VS Code is an editor. It can be used as an almost IDE with refactoring and stuff but compared to the other it sucks at it, very clunky.

I use both, for PHP and for Go, and they're very different beasts who both have their uses. It's weird to me that one could consider them in competition or having to "chose one" between them, unless you don't really know what kind of tool you want to work with.




We need to retire the IDE/Text Editor distinction. It really serves no purpose now other than to cause pointless debates or make people feel a bit more elite.

The line is too blurred between the 2 and it doesn’t really matter anyway.

Nearly all text editors these days are just modular IDEs, people add on the bits they want and do their work in them. May as-well just use IDE to describe all of them.


I know you've seen others use this line, and how smart they appeared doing so...

But for VSCode, the distinction just isn't there anymore. It has integrated debugging, refactoring, indexing, and all sorts of other language-specific features.


Yes, and if you use VS Code for those features it's terribly far behind the competition. Even its auto completion for PHP (a very nicely supported language) is nowhere near as complete and reliable as the one from PHPStorm. As for refactoring, well, it's not even in the same league.


So does Emacs. Emacs also has multiple webrowsers and email clients out of the box. Those features do not make Emacs not a text editor though.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: