I have no idea of why they were created, Windows certainly was the front-runner for GUI stuff. I worked at my first job doing java dev with emacs and I've been

I have no idea of why they were created, Windows certainly was the front-runner for GUI stuff. I worked at my first job doing java dev with emacs and I've been fully working on linux for the last several years and I still find eclipse to be superior. Maybe it is because the learning curve is lower and my emacs environment was never setup properly, but I think the OSGi framework (dependency management standard in eclipse) is genuinely useful and I love having everything I need in one program. I still find myself writing sed/awk/bash scripts occasionally, but my workflow in my IDE with mylyn integrated to bugzilla and SVN is just so much faster...