Why Are Some Developers so Allergic to IDEs?

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Countless times I meet developers who prefer simpler editors. And by “prefer” I mean that they have strong negative feelings towards any IDEs, especially the ones that one needs to pay money for.

Now, it’s worth mentioning that my path through coding tools over the last 20 years went like this:

Notepad -> Turbo Pascal Editor -> Delphi -> Visual Studio -> Gedit -> Sublime Text -> Vim -> Emacs -> Emacs (Evil mode) -> Atom -> Vim -> IntelliJ Idea (settled for now).

The switch to IDE had happened when I attended a Software Craft meet-up. I’ve paired with another developer who’ve shown me something that looked like magic to me at a time.

Basically, I’ve felt doubts about the tooling of my choice, since this IDE that was in front of me (in the hands of an experienced user) could allow me to do development at a 5x-10x rate of what I could currently.

Now the question is: why do we, developers, feel such negative feelings towards a paid tool that can boost our productivity so much?

Let’s discuss!