Normally, they consume a lot of disk space as well as memory and have a notable startup time. IDEs are most likely a more heavyweight solution. This could help finding a compromise between a fully-featured IDE and a text editor. It's worth noting that there are multiple "levels" of editors: When choosing the editor, one could choose between a simple text editor without any programming-related features (not even syntax highlighting), more advanced editors that have syntax highlighting, or something like IDLE, which is an IDE on the one hand, but at least in my opinion more like an advanced editor.
#IDE VS TEXT EDITOR CODE#
Using editor and terminal can demonstrate students that writing a program can be done without using a huge IDE including a lot of tools, as it is essentially not more than writing down instructions using a normal text editor and executing them.Īn advantage, especially for beginners, could be that it doesn't overexert the students with too much information - in contrast to IDEs that come with syntax highlighting, code style checking, automatic error correction and code suggestion. Editor and terminal often don't consume much space (or, at least, come bundled with the operating system so it doesn't really matter) and start fast. This is most likely the more lightweight solution. Don't know if they still offer it or not but I'd say Atom or VSCode are better along just about every conceivable metric. Simple, no configuration necessary, things that should be easy were easy, etc. They more or less made us use Komodo Edit (free version of the Komodo 'IDE') in my first programming class, which is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about and I think it really helped. EditĬan't believe I forgot to mention this but. And unlike VS/Xcode/Eclipse it doesn't obscure what you're doing with a bunch of platform-specific goobledegack: you're editing text files. Unlike notepad it gives you features you actually need to program, unlike nano it uses standard keyboard shortcuts they'll already know from e.g. They're scriptable in JavaScript and themable with CSS.
#IDE VS TEXT EDITOR DOWNLOAD#
Have your students download vscode or atom which work reasonably well out of the box with a healthy plug-in community for growth. I'll never forget the first time I opened XCode and basically said "what the hell is all of this?" They are user configurable but not easily. Ditto for emacs.Īnd that also applies to IDEs like Eclipse and Visual Studio. And while you couldn't pry vim out of my cold dead hands, learning it is easy if you already know programming but would be a nightmare if you had to learn it and programming at the same time. We've seen an explosion of hybrids in the last few years with good cross-platform support: Sublime, Atom, VSCode, etc. The main concern is cognitive load: learning to program is difficult enough without adding incidental complexity. TL DR Those two aren't your only options.