For a software developer, I don't spend as much time in front of an IDE as I'd like.

@oiledwheels hell yeah.

@oiledwheels Every IDE that does what an IDE is expected to do needs decent (not the latest, not even great, just decent) hardware to not lag hard.

If you are limited to hardware that isn't decent, you have to turn off static analysis - the thing that makes IDEs great.

@Oktokolo I got into software dev mostly with VSCode so I'm not actually sure, what qualifies an IDE? With LSP, static analysis feels more like the bare minimum any code-oriented text editor should have than an advanced feature. Vim has LSP. Kate has LSP ootb. Notepad++ has LSP.

@lorentz What really eats the RAM and CPU cycles are the inspections and error checking constantly running in the background as you type. If that is turned off, what is left is basically a text editor with syntax highlighting.

The line between IDE and developer-oriented text editor might actually have become somewhat fuzzy. Both support plugins nowadays and in theory you can do anything with plugins...

So maybe, it is more a philosophical distinction now: IDEs try to come with all you might need well-integrated out of the box and provide a maximum of comfort, while the enhanced text editors try to be lean by default.

That said, the possibly fattyest IDEs on the planet (the ones from JetBrains) are also the ones i like the most (i even pay for them).