IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

I used to use a Java-oriented IDE called “Visix Vibe”, at first as an experiment in application development with Java and then as an alternative to Delphi, which was my bread and butter tooling environment for custom application development.

Both of these IDE’s gave me a huge productivity boost, and it used to be a no-brainer to give customers a realizable estimate for getting the UI done, then wiring up logic, and get things ready to ship, etc.

I really miss these IDE’s, because of the integration factor. It was fun to wire up a database table and generate a form and immediately have something that could be used for data input and validation on the project - then spend a few weeks refining the UI to be more robust and cater to the application use case in focus.

These days, it feels like a lot more careful planning is needed to make sure the UI/API/backend realms can play properly together.

It would be nice to see some more progress on this level of tooling. It’s one thing to have an AI generate UI code - but I still think there is room for painting the code and using a UI to build a UI.

(The moment someone produces a properly WYSIWYG tool for JUCE, the glory days will begin again ..)

Have you tried Delphi lately, very fast, compiles in less than a second.

So, I have been using emacs on and off for 32 years at this point, and I my emacs all set up with eglot and rustic and magit and the like and it's great.. but I still find I just fall back to RustRover when doing development because (unlike some the classic TUI IDEs mentioned in TFA) it just never feels like it's fully glued together and it's always a bit fragile and I never remember how to do certain things -- even though I'm the one who set it up.

That and lack of a decent visual debugger situation.

So I have this weird thing where I use emacs for interactive git rebasing, writing commit messages, editing text files and munging text... and then RustRover for everything else.

It's sorta like the saying, "I wish I was the person my dogs think I am"... "I wish emacs was actually the thing that I think it is" ?

What a wonderful write up and I feel the same.

I've been working on my free time on a tui code editor in the same vein eventually with make and lldb built in.

One thing that's nearly impossible to replicate on modern systems is the extremely tight feedback loop these TUIs had. Keyboard latency was near non-existent while basic calculators these days will happily take a hundred milliseconds to process a key press.

We don't need to go back to the 66MHz era, but it's embarrassing that programs running on a dozen computer cores all executing at several gigahertz feel less responsive than software written half a century ago. Sure, compiling half a gigabyte of source code now finishes before the end of the year, but I rarely compile more than a hundred or new lines at a time and the process of kickstarting the compiler takes much longer than actual compilation.

A terminal is no more than a rendering environment. With some workarounds (a custom renderer and input loop most likely), you can probably compile Zed to run in a FreeDOS in the same environment you use to run Turbo Pascal. I doubt you'll get the same responsiveness, though.