I've coded in plain text editors all the way to full blown IDEs, and you're partially right, it's not the tooling that sets IDEs apart, but the seamless integra

I've coded in plain text editors all the way to full blown IDEs, and you're partially right, it's not the tooling that sets IDEs apart, but the seamless integration between several useful tools. I like small editors for small jobs, but I wouldn't dream of doing a new business application without an IDE these days. With sed a simple search and replace would need to be manually checked for unintended effects, but an IDE will do it without problems in seconds, unless you go out of your way to confuse it.