I wouldn't say that the command line is any more "real" than the GUI, certainly, for programming or anything else. Non-GUI debugging is, at least for me, an order of magnitude less productive than command-interface debugging, for instance. I recently ported an ASP app to Sun ASP, and not only had I no graphical debugger, but I had NO debugger at all. Furthermore, the Sun ASP engine usually didn't log the correct line number when it caught an error, preferring a number 10 or 20 greater than that. This is when the engine wasn't dying from SIGSEGVs arising from its inability to correctly unwind the stack. That was one of the more difficult debugging tasks I've encountered.
Contrast that with debugging servlets with NetBeans: Included is an instance of Tomcat set up for remote debugging, so it's absolutely trivial to get started and pop in a dynamic breakpoint or two and get an idea of what's going on by mouse-hovering over a few variables in the source. That's a helluva lot faster than peppering the code with printlns. My only real issue with NetBeans is that there's no vi-mode.
― libcrypt, Sunday, 15 July 2007 13:15 (sixteen years ago) link
> My only real issue with NetBeans is that there's no vi-mode.
http://externaleditor.netbeans.org/
― koogs, Monday, 16 July 2007 12:18 (sixteen years ago) link