I don't think there's an exact definition but broadly I would say if it has the majority of these features it's definitely an IDE:

• Integrated debugger
• Intellisense
• Build/debug shortcuts that start the build in the IDE
• Parsing of error/warnings from the build output into a structured list that you can click on

If you make something with all those then it's definitely an IDE. Without some of them it's more debatable. For example the old Arduino editor... I would still say is a very basic IDE even though it doesn't have a proper debugger - it has other heavily integrated development tools, e.g. the UART viewer.

They're just saying that so that they have a justification for making two IDEs.

It's a modular IDE.

I clearly didn't mean a legal contract. Come on.

It would mean a fancy badge, ideally being listed in the official docs, and probably some kind of promise about maintaining it.

It’s shown in the “owners”.

This is just way too subtle IMO.

I am asking for some kind of official badge or something on crates.io. Currently it just looks like any other crate. Dart has a feature like this I believe.

And regex was just an example. There are other crates that should be officially sanctioned but aren't.

It can optionally use a lock file. Not sure about peer dependencies tbh.

there are tools in python to help

I haven't actually used pex but it doesn't look like it solves this - it's more of a way of distributing full programs. The .pex files aren't editable, which is something you need for this use case.

I imagine this strategy has its share of tradeoffs and gremlins.

As far as I know there are no downsides. It's basically win-win.

how about 6 words, 10 words, 100 words

Yes exactly my point. How often do you need to delete exactly 100 words? Do you count them? Obviously not - you probably guess and delete 50, and then 25 and then 20 etc.

I thought it was exactly the same based on the description.

Ever had to make the same change on dozens of lines? Now you can do it in seconds.

This would be a big advantage... except multiple cursors were invented so I can easily do that without having to memorize a whole new editing language.

Yeah but sometimes you do get meaningless changes that aren't just whitespace even with auto formatters. For example if you change the indentation on some code and that causes it to wrap an expression.