What is an IDE? An IDE, or Integrated Development Environment, enables programmers to consolidate the different aspects of writing a computer program. IDEs increase programmer productivity by combining common activities of writing software into a single application: editing source code, building executables, and debugging. Editing Source Code
An IDE allows developers to start programming new applications quickly because multiple utilities don’t need to be manually configured and integrated as part of the setup process. Developers also don’t need to spend hours individually learning how to use different tools when every utility is represented in the same workbench.
The Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is a cross-platform application (for Windows, macOS, Linux) that is written in functions from C and C++. It is used to write and upload programs to Arduino compatible boards, but also, with the help of 3rd party cores, other vendor development boards.