I like your comments on the merits of IDEs vs. general utils. The overwhelming majority of people at my school use Visual Studio, they look at me funny when I u

I like your comments on the merits of IDEs vs. general utils. The overwhelming majority of people at my school use Visual Studio, they look at me funny when I use vim. I just say: "Linux is my IDE, vim is my text editor." Everything their IDEs can do, I can do with either vim alone or a combination of vim + shell/python utils. (Of course, sometimes this is too hard to do to be worthwhile, and the MS world enjoys a lot of proprietary products that have had years of maturity and don't have OSS counterparts, especially in the gaming industry; it's a seductive environment.) I use auto-completion when I think it's worthwhile, my vim supports tab completion in python files. My current exception is using Adobe's Flash Builder for Flex development since I needed to make programs now when I started, and didn't have time to learn the language+standard libs (which has consequently meant that I still don't know those things as well as if I had avoided auto-completion). Fortunately Flash Builder is built on top of Eclipse, so the occasional time I need Eclipse's integrated debugger for million line Java projects it's not a foreign interface. Yet I've never bothered to truly get used to Visual Studio, or Dreamweaver, or Delphi. To me those seem like the extraneous pieces of information I don't need since they're useless outside their very specific domains whereas vim is an investment that pays off time and time again in all sorts of areas.