Separating Text Editors from IDEs

The acronym "IDE" stands for Integrated Development Environment. There is a little bit of confusion as to what IDEs are, leading to questions like "Is TextPad an IDE?" (Spoiler: The answer is No).

TextPad is a text editor. There are distinct differences between a text editor and an IDE, even though they may look similar to a layperson. Chief of which, a text editor is part of an IDE. An IDE comprises of many components, one of which is a code editor of some sort.

What Text Editors do

Text editors edit text. It could be a block of code, a poem about dinosaurs or a dissertation about why dolphins are such jerks. Think of your text editor as a drum. The thing you beat with a stick so it makes sounds? Yeah, I know, that sounds wrong. But anyway...

Now a text editor isn't exactly a code editor, but it's awfully close. A code editor edits code, which is basically text. It's essentially a specialized kind of text editor, highlighting code structures and syntax errors, autocomplete suggestions and maybe even beautifying it for human eyes.

Now if you think of your text editor as a drum, think of your code editor as a full drum set with cymbals.

Full drum set.

Technically, not all code is text, but for most high-level programming languages, they are. Sublime Text, for example, can edit code for PHP, HTML, Python and a host of other languages. Notepad will edit the text just fine, but won't highlight syntax. That's pretty much the difference between editing code and editing text. Most text editors can edit code in a pinch, and vice versa.

As a web developer, I've had to use text editors to edit HTML, JavaScript and CSS code. And generally didn't encounter many problems. You could still do that for code that needs to be compiled, such as Java or C#, but that would make the process of development way harder than it needs to be.

What IDEs do

IDEs consolidate common developer tools onto one interface, so this potentially eliminates the need to individually configure separate software packages. At the very least, an IDE provides a code editor and an environment for running the code.

Now if following the earlier analogies, think of your IDE as a rock band setup with drums, keyboard, bass guitar and drum set, all in one place!

A full rock band setup.

Some IDEs provide other features, such as:
- file versioning.
- deployment management for DevOps.
- workflow and project management features.
- build automation
- specialized interfaces for mobile development, such as Android Studio.

An example of an IDE would be Eclipse (for Java and Python, among others) and Visual Studio (which handles C#, HTML and so on). They are called IDEs because they also run the code in addition to editing it. They can debug the code and point out syntax and (some) logical errors.

In a Nutshell

Text editors basically process and format text. IDEs almost always include a text editor of some sort, but the function of an IDE goes beyond text editing.

Text you later,
T___T