If I was in charge of Sun & wanted people to adopt something, I'd spend my time and money working out how to integrate my thing so that it "plays nice" with whatever editor the users want to use. I don't use anything from Sun at the moment, but I sometimes have to use VBA. I'm an Emacs user from way back when, and when I edit VBA, I find its inbuilt editor pretty frustrating, even though it has all these wonderful help functions and completions and colours and so on. Similarly I use "view source with" extension on Firefox so that I can edit text boxes (like this one) in Emacs if I need to.

If I was in charge of Microsoft or Sun, I'd try to make it so that people who like using Emacs or vi can edit VBA or Java or whatever via Emacs or vi, with the completions and help being available inside Emacs or vi, or from Emacs or vi, rather than trying to make them learn a completely different system for doing things. It seems like there is a serious lack of common sense in the computer industry.

Slickedit = best IDE.

vi = best non-IDE.

You need know nothing else.

Best phrase ever. :)

I have my own preferences over the debacle:

Java = Netbeans.

C/C++/PHP = Emacs (if I have an X session available)

C/C++/PHP = vi/vim (in every other case)

I find some Emacs features interesting, but vi's one-key commands are easier to learn than the weird ctrl-M-M-Ctrl-something weird key combinations to get stuff done. So graphical mode usually is Emacs, but in CLI mode vi wins hands down.

Oh, and for anything else that isn't code, VI all the way!

On my 6-month-old black MacBook with 2GB RAM NetBeans 6.1 starts in 13 seconds, whereas my all-time favourite editor vim starts in under 0.1 seconds. But I'm definitely more impressed by NetBeans than Eclipse, which seems to be a perplexing collection of bells and whistles that I can't work out for the life of me. I'm so glad Sun is finally waking up to the reality that the world is using JavaScript, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Python, etc - and Java is no panacea. In fact the JavaScript help in NetBeans is quite something to behold! See http://wiki.netbeans.org/JavaScript

Ah yes, IDEs - everything the vendor wants, and nothing but obstruction for the experienced developer.

Most of the IDEs I've used have been rubbish. I spent a lot of time at one company trying to avoid using the tool that we were supposed to be developing.

I settled on vim a long time ago as my editor of all things, partly because it works the same on all the platforms I use, but also because it doesn't torture my hands with complex control and meta key bindings. And remapping all the keys in emacs renders redundant my point about an editor working the same everywhere.

Can't say that I have used NetBeans, but I do like Eclipse - it's the IDE that persuaded to stop using vim for my day to day editing tasks at work. And it works the same on all the platforms I use. I am happy to see competition for Eclipse in the free space.

But vim still wins for most things as far as I am concerned.

I like it how the only editor/IDE that didn't get a link was the one the article was written about.