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Are IDEs mostly bloatware?
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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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Isn't PICO-8 an IDE? I guess it doesn't really fit the traditional defitinion, but it includes a code editor, image editor, and music editor.
I would argue that PICO-8 is an IDE for game development on a fictional console, but I could understand why others would disagree. It is not necessarily what you would think of when you think of an IDE, but it is a development environment specially integrated with tools for game development. You can make an entire game without leaving PICO-8, and that sounds like an IDE to me.
I think that's a fair argument. PICO-8 definitely could be called a primitive IDE. I think it's closer to being a primitive game engine with so much of its focus being on graphics and sound tooling.
While you can code simple things within PICO-8, I've found that as I've built bigger things, I work better in an outside editor, even if it only gets me smaller fonts, splitable windows, vim bindings, limited linting, and somewhat broken code completion.
This isn't a criticism of PICO-8 as an environment. I think there are a lot of strengths in its simplicity, especially for beginner coders.
I tend to make a distinction between a customizable editor with some support for a language (like vim+plugins) vs a dedicated all-in-one tool that fully understands the language and environment (IDE). PICO-8 is hard to place on that spectrum given it's an all-in-one tool, but switching to a modified editor gives you more features.