I prefer text editors over IDEs for hobby programming

At every software engineering job I've had, jetbrains has been the gold standard. It offers great full feature IDEs for just about every major language out there, including rust. I continue to use them for every job and I don't have anything generally bad to say.

However, I don't use them for hobby programming outside of work. I started using sublime text a few years ago for text stuff (like an alternative to notes) but quickly moved to use it as a high powered text editor for code. Sublime has a bunch of packages for syntax highlighting on a lot of old languages. I play around a lot with old languages like cobol, assembly, PL/I, etc. You'd have to had a different IDE for all three most of the IDEs are more like command line compilation tools.

I'm not really looking for full debugger, integrations, version control for hobby stuff. Oddly enough, I used to do some quick fixes for work by opening python files in notes and just brute force putting in fixes (do not try this at home kids). This made me realize I preferred less distraction from IDEs.

When it comes to compilation and debugging, you can create your own instructions in sublime including linters. I love the idea of creating my own system for every language but it lives all in one text editor. In my opinion, this works better if you play around with a lot of languages. I would not recommend this in a standard work environment where you should really be following standard dev practices.

I love to work on legacy code which basically requires reverse engineering. Having a place you can build you own debugger and are encouraged to do so is great. It's super lightweight and fairly bare bones.

I remember in college I had a java professor who wanted us to use jgrasp instead of intellij or eclipse. Jgrasp is super bare, very similar to net beans. It gives old school but it has debuggers and unit testing. This particular professor also required submitted homework answers for discrete math in LaTeX and handwritten programming exams.

At the time I thought it was a pain but it strengthened me as a programmer greatly! I came out of those classes able to do white boarding interviews and really think about what I was building. I was lucky to have that professor for java I & II, discrete math I & II, and algorithms.