It’s fun to talk about.

Vs code has no integrated environment though, it’s just a text editor that supports plugins, you still need to install python or node or .net or Java or gcc, etc.

As far as vim requiring keyboard commands, that’s really only the case if you leave mouse mode off

set mouse=a

And of course, to muddy the water further, we have tools like https://helix-editor.com/ which, more closely approximate vs code, while happening to live in a terminal.

I maintain that in order to qualify as an IDE and not a glorified text editor, you must be able to, out of the box, without external dependencies, run and build the code it was built for (idea/visual studio) otherwise it’s not very integrated, and I don’t think you need to have nice graphics for that qualification.

I would say that an IDE is something that includes build/run tools integrated into it. Everything else is just a text editor. (But that’s just my opinion of course)

To expand on my point, I don’t think it makes sense to call vs code an integrated development environment if it doesn’t actually have the environment integrated.

Visual studio and idea would be examples of IDEs, they actually have all of the tools and frameworks needed to run the languages they were built for out of the box.

You can’t run node or python out of the box with just vs code for example, without their respective tooling, all vscode can do is edit the code and editing code is not functionally different from editing any other text.

So I maintain that both vim and vscode are text editors and not IDEs

Vim and emacs are text editors.

Vs code is a code editor (but really it’s also just a text editor)

Maybe they mean IDEs like visual studio?

I’ve never really heard it called a coding GUI before.