I haven't done much development in Java since my days in college, but... However, I really think that increasing speed of development with better tools is a co

I haven't done much development in Java since my days in college, but... However, I really think that increasing speed of development with better tools is a cornerstone of being one of those elite programmers, and vim<<eclipse, at least for Java! For every other language that I have encountered, the utilities listed by the OP (especially vim/emacs) are the better tools, as far as I'm concerned. Firstly, they were written by hackers for hackers, and because of that, they generalize just about all the functionality a programmer is likely to need when coding in any language. Even supposing there were eclipse-like IDEs for every language out there, it is more than likely that there will necessarily be differences between them (since they were written for different languages) which will be jarring for the power user. One would have to learn an IDE for every language. With vim and the assorted tools mentioned in the OP, one just needs to learn one set of tools and can use them for every language. If you foresee that you will only code in one language for the rest of your life, then sure, find the best IDE for that language. In my job, however, I have to code in C++, Python, Perl, PHP and shell (most times editing source files in more than one language at the same time), so to increase speed of development, (though I am no elite programmer) I use vim.