Wow what what a rant. - I think that different languages (and programmers) suit themselves to different balances of the IDE/Editor combination. I agree with yo

Wow what what a rant. - I think that different languages (and programmers) suit themselves to different balances of the IDE/Editor combination. I agree with your post, inasmuch as I find writing Java outside of an IDE like Eclipse limits you greatly. It sounds like you write Java a lot. - OTOH, I find writing C/C++ in Emacs with cscope/etags/make support and some custom keystrokes, and functions for common Unix calls, is about as good as any IDE can get you for those languages (although I admit that I've only had limited C++ IDE experience, using Visual Studio.) Yes, you have to do custom configuring to get Emacs working well. So, it's a small amount of extra upfront work over Eclipse. The upside is that you get to customize it however you want. In Eclipse I'm still using most of the default configuration, for the simple reason that it works "well enough" I find writing Erlang in Emacs erlang-mode is fine as well, mostly because the language doesn't encourage me to create the kind of horrible architectural behemoths that you _need_ an IDE to manage. The difference between Language-oriented and IDE-oriented approaches to programming was laid out really well in a recent blog post that made it to HN, but I can't find it with a quick google - sorry.