IDE vs Editor and terminal for CS1 I am involved in the teaching of CS1 and CS2 at the University of Oslo. We have recently transitioned from Java to Python as our introductory language. We have a strong tradition of teaching students how to use text editors and the terminal to write and run programs, in a Unix environment at our university. Recently, however, a discussion among the teaching staff has arisen about whether or not to transition to using an IDE for the teaching of first-year programming.

Can anyone give me their thoughts on this matter? What are the pros and what are the cons of moving to an IDE-first approach, rather than sticking with editor+terminal?
TL;DR Those two aren't your only options. 

The main concern is cognitive load: learning to program is difficult enough without adding incidental complexity. 

We've seen an explosion of hybrids in the last few years with good cross-platform support: Sublime, Atom, VSCode, etc. And while you couldn't pry vim out of my cold dead hands, learning it is easy if you already know programming but would be a nightmare if you had to learn it and programming at the same time. Ditto for emacs.

And that also applies to IDEs like Eclipse and Visual Studio. They have their own way of doing things. They take forever to open. They are user configurable but not easily. I'll never forget the first time I opened XCode and basically said "what the hell is all of this?"

Have your students download vscode or atom which work reasonably well out of the box with a healthy plug-in community for growth. They're scriptable in JavaScript and themable with CSS. Unlike notepad it gives you features you actually need to program, unlike nano it uses standard keyboard shortcuts they'll already know from e.g. MS Word (Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-S, etc). And unlike VS/Xcode/Eclipse it doesn't obscure what you're doing with a bunch of platform-specific goobledegack: you're editing text files.

Edit

Can't believe I forgot to mention this but...

They more or less made us use Komodo Edit (free version of the Komodo 'IDE') in my first programming class, which is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about and I think it really helped. Simple, no configuration necessary, things that should be easy were easy, etc. Don't know if they still offer it or not but I'd say Atom or VSCode are better along just about every conceivable metric.