> There is a much bigger chasm between GIMP and Photoshop than there is between VS Code (with plugins) and JetBrains.

I don't believe this to be true. I think the difference is graphic designers tend to use much more of their toolings' functions, whereas almost every day I'm surprised someone I work with doesn't even know some IDE feature was possible, let alone how to use it. Hell, almost every frontend developer I've ever seen use either VSCode or WebStorm orchestrates everything from the built-in terminal and is baffled when they never see me use one - because it's all configured via run configurations, and that's a _basic_ feature.

That makes sense though.. Terminal commands are easy to put into team wiki or record in personal notes or put into your CI config. There is a command history, it is easy to chain commands, etc..

Unless using IDE's native tooling is making you much more productive (say its debugging does not work without it) it is better to avoid it if possible.

IDE's native tooling makes you more productive because you set it up and never interact with it. If you need to manually do stuff, or do it all the time, you can slap it behind a keybinding. My cmd+F6 to do everything that needs to be done to get the iOS app built and debugging inside a simulator is obviously going to be more productive than having to jump into the terminal every time. Ditto for the run configuration (also cmd+F6 in a different project) that spins up docker and all that blah blah to get the API server running.

This is what I'm talking about, for what it's worth, a programmer doesn't immediately see the utility in the tool and doesn't use it, and that's the story for 99% of the things an IDE does. It's always faster to do it yourself once, or twice, especially considering setup time and learning curve, so people don't make use of the tools. I see people using grep instead of their IDE search because they cbf to figure out how to do it in the IDE!

It's like we're carpenters who hate power tools.

> Unless using IDE's native tooling is making you much more productive (say its debugging does not work without it) it is better to avoid it if possible.

I have a friend who works as a dev for a decently sized software editor, so he's seen his fair share of people interacting with the tools. They work mainly with Java and the company pays for Intellij for everyone.

He's often complaining about how people never try to learn the IDE and always do things manually. They usually don't really know what they're doing in the terminal, either (they mostly use Windows, so the terminal is rarely second nature).

But whenever he shows them a few nicer features, typically around refactoring and such, they're always blown away and never look back.

He has, of course, interacted with his fair share of graybeards who only use vim, but those people don't usually take ages to accomplish simple tasks.