Visual Studio. The grand tool the author is thinking of is Visual Studio. It is light years ahead of anything vim and emacs can do, though I concede that basic

Visual Studio. The grand tool the author is thinking of is Visual Studio. It is light years ahead of anything vim and emacs can do, though I concede that basic text entry and editing is slightly more clunky in it. Then, at the really high end, you have tools like Intel's VTune which let you profile your application in ways you never could with only Visual Studio. The author's gripe is pretty much that professional tools have free versions for the home tinkerer and affordable licenses for the lone professional.