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I used to think like this too, but I now categorize this as "making easy things easier" and I try to focus only on things that "make hard things easier". Now the main thing I value is flexibility, and that's mainly achieved by mainly spending my time in a programmable environment (the shell), and a CLI editor like Vim fits the most smoothly into this approach.

To give an example, let's say you want to make pull requests for an API change across several interdependent repos (e.g., an API change in a framework). So you want to you want to do a find and replace in each repo, then push the changes to a branch, and create a pull request for each one. This can be achieved entirely from the command line, making it really easy to repeat across all the repos that need to be updated.

(With all the above said, I do use most LSP features, like live error checking and autocomplete, but if I were forced to choose, I would give that up before I give up the flexibility of a programmable environment.)



Using a powerful IDE does not preclude dropping into the command line for that kind of repetitive, scriptable work, and many of us do use both.


I’m curious to see how you’ll automate this in e.g. IntelliJ, that doesn’t allow you to open multiple projects side by side. No, opening multiple instances of IntelliJ is not the answer.


Open terminal, run the script in the terminal? You don't have to load the IDE to write to files just because you do your manual work in the IDE.




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