Claude in a terminal is becoming more and more my IDE. I use emacs to do some edits or to look at some files, but orders of magnitude less than when I wrote all the code.
Syntax highlighting? Yes, for readability. Completion? I noticed today that maybe I broke the language server for Ruby but I didn't bother to investigate. Maybe next week, or next month.
Git log, blame, diff, yes, as usual.
I don't see a bright future for IDEs. Vi or emacs from the 90s could be all we need.
Non developers using AIs to vibe code their projects maybe won't need any editor at all, nor an IDE.
I have found that I need more than this. A document viewer is critical so I can see HTML prototypes, review docs and other output and give feedback contextually inline (through a commenting system). I also need a task lists for my project/ agents so I can see where things are. I created an app like this for myself that is built around an integrated terminal, after I had the epiphany that VS Code (and VIM) were becoming the wrong tool because I am not actually spending time _writing_ the code.
all those things wouldnt be done in an ide anyways
fine, I need an "integrated agent collaboration environment" instead of an integrated development environment. I find value in them all being in the same app because it brings everything I need into a single work flow.
Have you tried Zed?
Kind of. I tried it on a really small project, but I've been reading about it and have seen a few demos and reviews. It is still too 'code focused' for me.
For context, I am a product manager at a big tech company who has been building side apps for fun (and profit) since the days of Palm OS. I am effectively an SDE1 with 20 years experience, who has deep expertise in a lot of obsolete tech (C, Objective-C, Perl) and some exposure to modern stuff (TS, React, Rust, Swift).
In the past year, I've been able to personally drive projects several orders of magnitude than what I could ever build myself. I'm not asking Fable to 1-shot grand theft auto, I am creating steering files, running adversarial reviews, prototyping, automating testing, and building my projects the slow way. Still, I don't write any code, just requirements and prompts and generate the rest. Our internal development teams at my company have arrived at a very similar process (much more sophisticated) by investing heavily in steering files that encode development approaches, harness and other mechanisms to automate best practices. It is getting to the point where our development process are becoming really similar, and many of the SDE do not need to review code for the majority of their deliverables, instead they are working on the framework (harnesses) and auditing. (Of course they still do look at the code because the love coding. But they usually don't need to)
That’s exactly why Rune is also a terminal multiplexer. Rune acts as a bridge between automated and manual programming. You can fuzzy-search for symbols and files and reference them right from the chat UI, without having to copy and paste. When the agent is working, it uses Rune’s symbol index and IDE-grade toolset instead of greping the codebase. It also gets compilation errors right after applying patches.
And this is just the beginning. I think there’s so much more to explore in this space.
What about search, and "find usages", and other affordances for navigating the codebase? I know vi can search within a file, but I think with larger codebases you need something more powerful.
Emacs does it. I don't remember which package I'm using and my laptop is out of reach now, but it leverages LSP. However my point is that I never used that functionality in the last months. I discovered today that M-. doesn't work anymore. It's the key combination to jump to the definition of something. Of course I used to hit it all the times. Maybe I broke it weeks ago with some configuration change. To give you some context, I'm a web developer, frontend and backend, currently Ruby, Python, Vue. I've been doing this job for more than 30 years.
vim buffers also work very well with agents