I use Visual Studio with ViEmu and Visual Assist X. While I really hated Visual Studio (and still do), this combination of tools really makes it worthwhile. It

I use Visual Studio with ViEmu and Visual Assist X. While I really hated Visual Studio (and still do), this combination of tools really makes it worthwhile. It is an awesome marriage of a mediocre IDE, some substantial refinements to make it usable, and a phenomenal text editor. The nice thing about ViEmu is that is extremely full-featured. It even reads my entire .vimrc with all my customizations and personal magic! So, I guess what I want to say is that instead of deciding between using an IDE and a text editor, you should actually use both! Real progress lies in synthesis, not analysis!