# What IDE for Julia + other languages?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/what-ide-for-julia-other-languages/46208>\
**Category:** Offtopic\
**Created:** [September 7, 2020, 5:19pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/what-ide-for-julia-other-languages/46208 "2020-09-07T17:19:05Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 7\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![DoktorMike](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/doktormike/32/2736_2.png) [@DoktorMike](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/DoktorMike)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2020, 6:57pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/what-ide-for-julia-other-languages/46208/21 "2020-09-08T18:57:22Z")

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I would definitely recommend vim/neovim or even barebone Vi. I’ve been programming in it for decades now and though I’ve tried all the new kids on the block I am just much more productive in vim. There’s a learning curve but in my experience it’s really worth it.

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**Author:** ![anon92994695](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ce7236/32.png) [@anon92994695](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/anon92994695)\
**Post date:** [September 8, 2020, 9:51pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/what-ide-for-julia-other-languages/46208/22 "2020-09-08T21:51:33Z")

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@marius311 - Ah I was missing the “when” lines! Without those it will do the obvious not so good thing. Thanks for this.

This is kind of what I meant when I said each IDE has it’s own “language”, whether it’s buckets of JSON or otherwise. It’s a little rough navigating unless you are digging into them for dev purposes. In which case, all of these details seem more important to entertain.

@Tamas_Papp - Everyone says Emacs is a great tool. I’ll probably take a crack at it eventually. I’ll be honest though - it is intimidating.

@DoktorMike - you may not know this, but, I am the author of VIMKiller :D. All joking aside, undeniably if you learn the shortcuts in VIM it is a great editor. Many IDEs even support VI(M) hotkeys. One of the things I rely on heavily for productivity in dynamic languages is live code execution, it’s so much easier to debug and test things on the fly then write file, run file, read error message soup, debug, etc. So going to pure VI is not my cup of tea unless I’m on a headless machine. That said, VSCode has pretty robust remote editing tools (highly recommend them), so I haven’t ended up in that spot for a year or so now.

Technically Tmux + Zsh + VIM/Nano + REPL/interpretter isn’t far from what I need in a modern IDE, but I do like a lot of the bells and whistles and do like to use my mouse for some tasks :).

Thanks for the suggestions everyone I was pretty scared this would become a flame war.

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**Author:** ![TheLateKronos](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/thelatekronos/32/12824_2.png) [@TheLateKronos](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/TheLateKronos)\
**Post date:** [September 10, 2020, 5:15am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/what-ide-for-julia-other-languages/46208/23 "2020-09-10T05:15:00Z")

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Anyone tried Theia?

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**Author:** ![ffevotte](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/ffevotte/32/6587_2.png) [@ffevotte](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ffevotte)\
**Post date:** [September 10, 2020, 9:41am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/what-ide-for-julia-other-languages/46208/24 "2020-09-10T09:41:03Z")

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I did! Cf

> [@Compatibility between Theia and the Julia VS Code extension](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/compatibility-between-theia-and-the-julia-vs-code-extension/46047):
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> I discovered [Theia](https://theia-ide.org/) as a possible alternative to VS code in [this thread](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/github-annouced-codespace-does-it-mean-atom-is-now-abandoned/38923/24), and decided to give it a try. It looks like a lot of features from the Julia VScode extension work out of the box, which is in itself an incredible achievement. However, I keep getting crashes from the LanguageServer, with an output like the following: [ Info: Starting the Julia Language Server [ Info: Symbol server store is at '/home/theia/.theia/globalStorage/julialang.language-julia/symbolstorev2'. [ Info: Received new…

TL;DR: mostly everything that I tried works out-of-the box with the Julia VS Code extension, except that the language server frequently crashes.

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**Author:** ![TheLateKronos](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/thelatekronos/32/12824_2.png) [@TheLateKronos](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/TheLateKronos)\
**Post date:** [September 10, 2020, 12:37pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/what-ide-for-julia-other-languages/46208/25 "2020-09-10T12:37:06Z")

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Yhea, your post was what made me aware of Theia ^-^. Do you like it so far? Is it your main IDE? Why/why not?

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**Author:** ![ffevotte](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/ffevotte/32/6587_2.png) [@ffevotte](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ffevotte)\
**Post date:** [September 10, 2020, 2:23pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/what-ide-for-julia-other-languages/46208/26 "2020-09-10T14:23:19Z")

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It’s not my main IDE, I’m using the only one and true editor: Emacs 🙂

The reason why I tried it was because at work we needed to come up with a solution combining several features & constraints:

- IDE capabilities for several languages (at least C++ & Julia)
- supporting remote editing with several users
- entirely self-hosted (potentially running on our own machines)
- not too difficult to set up.

Theia was a good alternative to VS Code + Liveshare. Its opensourceness is a definite advantage (and complete independence from Microsoft accounts / cloud). However, it only features remote editing, as opposed to Liveshare’s full collaborative editing.

In any case, I haven’t used Theia for extensive periods of time (yet), but as a first impression I’ve been rather impressed to find it so featureful and easy to install (in a docker container).

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**Author:** ![lwhitefox](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/lwhitefox/32/4363_2.png) [@lwhitefox](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/lwhitefox)\
**Post date:** [September 12, 2020, 4:32pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/what-ide-for-julia-other-languages/46208/27 "2020-09-12T16:32:58Z")

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> [@Tamas\_Papp](#):
>
> So you customize your environment to be able to work faster, _and_ then notice that 2 hours have passed without doing any actual work.

Ha - are you trying to describe my morning yesterday 😀😀

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