I'm a hard-core emacs devotee since 1988, and I used to think the same way- who needs freakin' autocomplete? But a good friend made me try one out, and indeed,

I'm a hard-core emacs devotee since 1988, and I used to think the same way- who needs freakin' autocomplete? But a good friend made me try one out, and indeed, a decent IDE really does make a big difference in certain environments. For example, being able to click through an entire app from Spring XML config, all the way through your own source code, into library files, and even the source for the JRE makes a huge, huge difference in productivity. And languages/libraries/frameworks change all the time; the IDEs tend to follow these things closely. Having to maintain your own hand-crafted elisp (or whatever) takes a lot of work. I've been there, and I don't plan on going back any time soon.