I prefer it. I have experience working in good IDEs. For many years I did .NET development, and Visual Studio is very, very good. However, over time I realize

I prefer it. I have experience working in good IDEs. For many years I did .NET development, and Visual Studio is very, very good. However, over time I realized that even with all their awesome features, powerful IDEs were a net-loss to my productivity. They work best from a single machine and that made me a lot less likely to work remotely (I have done my best work in the middle of the night, from home). Their less responsive UIs made it easier for me to get distracted. Their slow startup times exacerbated my natural proclivity to procrastinate. I realized: My working memory is fine for most projects, and emacs' text-based autocomplete fills in the rest. All I'm saying is: don't assume that the way you work, the tools you prefer, or the tradeoffs you make are universal. There are a lot of programmers out there, and a whole lot of tools. (If you really care, I have an interview about my setup here: http://aaron.boodman.usesthis.com/ http://aaron.boodman.usesthis.com/)