I stay away from IDEs. They are just massively bloated text editors as far as I'm concerned. I prefer my SciTE to do my editing, and my aterm from which I do my making. I guess it would be called a UIDE for UnIntegrated Development Environment

I rarly use IDE's, though, if I'm playing with GTK stuff I'll use GLADE, which is rather nice, though mostly I'll just use two xterms, one with vim, and another in cli for compilation/testing of whatever I've written.

I also don't use IDEs. I usually have Emacs and terminal opened on one virtual desktop, and any other needed tools (such as file manager, graphic and sound tools) on other desktops.

Hehe, I just pressed CTRL+x CTRL+s (which is a save command in Emacs) instead of clicking Submit button.

I'll have to use eclipse for university work soon. My impression so far is that even more than emacs, it's an operating system in an operating system. It's huge, takes a few seconds to load. It is very extensible, which is good. Its autocompletion feature is insane, you can almost write a program without touching the keyboard, as if you're working on the command line and your tab key is stuck

Quanta Plus, although I wish it could use Gecko for rendering >_>

When start non-web coding a lot, I'm probably going to use KDevelop.

Anjuta (http://anjuta.sourceforge.net) is a GNOME-based C/C++ IDE.

also Eclipse is Java-based and I don't think gcj can build or run it, only Sun's JVM

I've been using eclipse a bit now, it's the first IDE I ever used (well, except for Turbo C 2.0 on the olde atari, but that doesn't really compare to what we call an IDE today). My impression is that it's a whole load of tools hidden in menus, which are all meant to work around language design mistakes in your programming language. If you are an inexperienced Java or C++ programmer, using an IDE might be a good idea. On the other hand you will never become an experienced programmer if you use an IDE with all that handholding, quite like spellcheckers prevent you from learning to type.

I'd say if you use a well designed programming language, such as python, you don't need an IDE, a simple text editor maybe with syntax highlighting will do. And if you want to refactor your code, there's bicycle repair man ( http://bicyclerepair.sourceforge.net/ ), I haven't tried that though...

The Fedora Project has ported Eclipse to GNU Java.

gedit or vim with highlighting - all you really need. But, I do use Eclipse occasionally, and have used Anjuta in the past.

Dare I say it, but Apple's XCode is some serious sweetness as an IDE.

I usually use an IDE, because I am pretty new to programming, and want to have to deal with one thing at a time, I usually use Eclipse, or Gedit, or something along the lines of that

although I do hand write my code, just so I learn

For me, an IDE is a must. I simply must have something where my files on a website are on the left, my syntax is colorized, and the line numbering is accurate. Anything else is just icing on the cake.

I use Bluefish for my IDE. I was using Screem but I was screaming when I couldn't get it to turn off the popup that occurs when you type something like this in PHP:

$a .= "<BR>";

...and the HTML popup occurs even though you use <BR> countless times in code.

Four things I dislike about Bluefish are:

* Preferences dialog box is a bit amateurish and confusing.
* No "Find in Files" feature.
* Can't turn off autoclose tags in preferences -- have to do CTRL+T on each page you open, which gets aggravating.
* Does not highlight pairs of symbols, such as brackets, braces, quotes, parens, etc.

I have posted these as feature requests to Bluefish's Sourceforge pages, but they don't seem all that interested in fixing these things yet unfortunately.

Other than that, the highlighting works (although you have to sometimes press F5) and the program loads fairly fast. It also seems to use memory fairly efficiently and crash a little far less than Screem.

I used to use Quanta+ a great deal, but then I moved away from KDE and KDE apps and into the GNOME world. I like the interface not being so loud and Windows-XP-ish with eye candy. GNOME had just enough eye candy for me. So that's why Screem and Bluefish were things I wanted to consider.