The difference is just that for your IDE, someone had already written the code necessary to make it do what you want. That's not because the IDE is an IDE and E

The difference is just that for your IDE, someone had already written the code necessary to make it do what you want. That's not because the IDE is an IDE and Emacs is Emacs, it's just because someone happened to write that code for Emacs. My point was that this has nothing to do with Emacs vs IDEs. It's true that some things are lacking, so it's too bad that whoever wrote the code that does your high-level syntactic analysis didn't make it independent enough that it could be used in other places than whatever IDE you were referring to.