I've used both IDEs (Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA) and Emacs. Originally I preferred the IDEs, but then I learned how to use Emacs properly. Besides, Emacs actually c

I've used both IDEs (Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA) and Emacs. Originally I preferred the IDEs, but then I learned how to use Emacs properly. Besides, Emacs actually combines the best of both worlds for some languages like Scala or any sort of Lisp. (But, notably, not Java.) I may be crazy about Emacs, but I'd probably still use an IDE if I had to do significant Java development. This says far less about IDEs and editors than it does about Java: I'm going to try very hard not to do any significant Java development in the future, thank you very much! And that's really the entire point of my earlier post: it was not in favor of editors or IDEs, it was in favor of not using Java. Java is a poor language cursed with a good implementation: it's too good to die but not good enough to use. A common argument I hear from people defending Java is that their IDE can generate half their code for them. And that was what I was really responding to: if you can use a tool to automatically generate all that code, it should just not be there in the first place! Your experiences using an IDE for Java say as little about the relative merits of an IDE or text editor as experiences using Emacs on some Lisp: they're both extreme cases. And, more importantly, the reason normal editors are poor for Java, and the reason that SCdF is not touching a normal editor, are endemic to Java and not to the other tools.