Unix as IDE

Newbies and experienced professional programmers alike appreciate the concept of the IDE, or integrated development environment. Having the primary tools necessary for organising, writing, maintaining, testing, and debugging code in an integrated application with common interfaces for all the different tools is certainly a very valuable asset. Additionally, an environment expressly designed for programming in various languages affords advantages such as autocompletion, and syntax checking and highlighting.

With such tools available to developers on all major desktop operating systems including Linux and BSD, and with many of the best free of charge, there’s not really a good reason to write your code in Windows Notepad, or with nano or cat.

However, there’s a minor meme among devotees of Unix and its modern-day derivatives that “Unix is an IDE”, meaning that the tools available to developers on the terminal cover the major features in cutting-edge desktop IDEs with some ease. Opinion is quite divided on this, but whether or not you feel it’s fair to call Unix an IDE in the same sense as Eclipse or Microsoft Visual Studio, it may surprise you just how comprehensive a development environment the humble Bash shell can be.