Some IDEs are great. Some text editors are also great. Maybe vim can be made to do it (ctags or whatever they are called?), Don't use ctags. Use cscope. And s

Some IDEs are great. Some text editors are also great. Maybe vim can be made to do it (ctags or whatever they are called?), Don't use ctags. Use cscope. And stop being such a pansy about configuring your tools. If you consider yourself a professional, it is worth learning. Basically, there's no right answer to the question, but there are wrong reasons to choose. If you want to go with IDEs because you don't want to think too hard about your tools, I would say that's a bad reason. Your IDE skills are going to suck if you go in with that attitude. A better reason might be: you want to work with your code at a higher level than mere bytes in a buffer. I know guys who can make Eclipse or IntelliJ do insanely perverted things to their Java code, automatically. Good for them! I prefer vim because I generally work in scripting languages where a refactoring IDE doesn't help much. I like the fact that my editing session can live in a screen, which can be resumed from anywhere in the world. vim+screen is the most rock-solid dev environment you can get. And since vim is so ensconced in the unix way of small tools combined, there are few features of IDEs that I can't at least emulate. Meanwhile, my TextMate-using colleague accidentally searched for the letter 'v' in our entire codebase, and his laptop locked up for 10 minutes. The best part is that he did it AGAIN by accident a few minutes later.