>Anyone that ... has had a physical job knows that doing something 26 times in a row is basic stuff of any worthwile endeavor.

I have. There were an awful lot of electric tools doing things that used to require manual work. And they were used even the old guys who were fighting against their broken bodies to work for long enough be able to retire.

Maybe also set your font to bright green Comic Sans while you're at it..?

That just sounds painful if you work on large projects.

Yeah, early in my career I got by with gedit on Ubuntu but before too long a 700,000+ line PHP project with deep, deep inheritance trees showed up and I very much embraced an IDE.

Would running a command line debugger be too different from your approach.

I would consider bothering with some static analysis tool, but definitely not with php or other runtime heavy languages.

They tend to have this nasty habit of running the entire world, though.

Rarely, it's mostly small projects, but many many many of them.

Proudly written on a device run by a huge collection of huge projects

Use scite please, it's a match with your brutalist approach to development, but with some goodies. You won't regret.

And corrupt the purity of my no-dependency development environment? No way.

This approach extends to the application environment as well, download nothing, use Operating System tools, code the rest.

Download nothing. Upload only.

It's not a download, it's a blessing. It's not corrupting, it's purifying. It's syntax highlighting for your strained eyes and block commenting for your sore fingers. It's peace. Take care.

I love your extreme position. I don't believe it could work for any of the projects I work on, and even if it would it would be a huge time sink and it would hold me back a lot.

But I dream about a simpler world where I could just open nano on a dusted terminal in a basement, grab my printed copy of a OS manual, and code away.

the only time i would ever consider doing that is when building a hello world application