For me, as a data point, there are a couple of reasons. 1) Because when I started programming, that's what I used. I'm comfortable in it because I'm comfortab

For me, as a data point, there are a couple of reasons. 1) Because when I started programming, that's what I used. I'm comfortable in it because I'm comfortable in it :-) I'm pretty sure that's most of the issue to be honest. When I've asked people what they like most about their graphical IDEs, I've come away with the impression that the same thing governs the majority of their preference: it's what they are used to. 2) My vision is poor. I use a 22 point font. The layout of most GUI programs tends to leave no room for editing if I use the same kind font size (I also have poor peripheral vision, so I use a 13" display which fits comfortably in the section of space that I can see). Things like menu bars, file trees, object trees, test panels, etc, etc are more than useless to me. If I close all of them down, I'm left with exactly what I have in my terminal window. 3) I don't like to use a mouse. I use a tiling window manager. Often I work in tmux (for which I've set up key bindings exactly the same as my tiling window manager) and I might not even have X running (I probably have the most tricked out linux console of anybody I've ever heard of). I used to have a trackball, but I've given it up and now work exclusively with a laptop with a track pad because I've gotten myself to the point where I almost never have to use it. 4) Performance. I have 8 gigs of memory in this laptop. I have swap turned off. I almost never use more than 2 gigs at a time (sometimes I have a VM which has 2 gigs allocated to it, so then my memory usage creeps up to 4 gigs). Lots of memory for file buffers :-) People are always amazed at how responsive my machine is, despite being a 3 year old i5 mobile processor with 8 gigs of memory. IDE's are bloatware for me. I won't use the extra features anyway. Most of this is personal, but that's what you get for preferences. A few people I've worked with have seen my setup and have gone a similar way. I know a couple of people who also live in Emacs -- they never leave Emacs if they can help it because everything is completely integrated in a way that you just can't do in other environments (that I've seen, anyway). In the late 90's I worked on Windows stuff and my employer forced me to use Visual Studio (yeah, employers actually pulled crap like that in the 90's). I eventually modified it to the point where I liked it quite a lot. I'm sure I could do the same with most IDEs out there now, but there's no point. The terminal gives me everything I want at minimal resource overhead.