It's the _default_, as they say in the article:

> There is no mandated development environment. Some developers use vim. Some use Emacs. And even more engineers use our internal, unified development environment called Nuclide.

"Default" readily morphs into "only supported". Into "if you use something else and complain to IT when it breaks, IT addresses the issue by replying 'try using an editor from this century'."

To my knowledge the "default" editor has changed ~3 times in the past 5 years (fbide, atom, vscode) - and yet I've been using vim this whole time with no problems, and never had anybody suggest that I stop ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

When everyone uses a different editor then no one gets support.

Default is definitely different than mandated. Facebook provides engineers a ton of freedom for their development environment.

There are many at FB where we would have to pry vim or emacs out of their hands, and, even then, we would not be successful. :-)

Having a recommended/default IDE is not the same thing as forcing everyone to use it.

In every place I've been, the IDE choice has been more of a team decision, configuration was personal (some short-cuts, colors, etc). Too much time went into the build environment and other development tools for us, plus if you wanted someone to come in and help (short term pair programming), you need to be on the same page.

> In every place I've been, the IDE choice has been more of a team decision

What OS(es) were you using at the time?

In my experience, IDE choice was a team decision in Windows (and perhaps Mac?) shops, where the build system was tightly coupled to the IDE.

But in shops that develop Linux code, the IDE and build system tend to be loosely coupled, and the IDE was a matter of personal preference.

Java is also like this. In Java shops it's pretty much Eclipse or GTFO.