Which tools are winning the real IDE wars – and does your setup secretly say more about you than your job title? In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Elliot Miller, Seamus Kearney and William Lark unpack the ongoing battle between editors, IDEs and themes across software engineering, cloud, DevOps, data and more.

From VS Code vs IntelliJ/WebStorm vs Notepad++ and Vim to light mode vs dark mode and AI copilots baked into your editor, they explore what actually makes IT work faster, safer and more fun – no matter where you sit in the stack.

In this episode, we explore:

How the original Vim vs Emacs editor wars started – and why those flame wars still shape today’s IDE choices across engineering, DevOps and sysadmin roles

• Why VS Code has surged to the top of Stack Overflow’s surveys, and where heavyweight tools like Visual Studio, IntelliJ, Android Studio and Rider still shine for large codebases, game dev and enterprise apps

• The surprisingly passionate light vs dark mode debate – including accessibility, colour-blindness, multi-window setups with Slack and browsers, and how your theme can genuinely impact comfort and focus

• How AI tools like GitHub Copilot and natural-language “Lego programming” might change IDEs completely, from writing tests for you to a future where you barely see code at all

Whether you’re a software engineer, SRE, cloud engineer, data practitioner or IT generalist, if you live in terminals, dashboards and editors all day, this one will have you rethinking your toolkit – and probably your theme as well.

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