Deep down, you know that IDEs suck

Let's not kid ourselves, most IDEs are pretty good in general. There is however, an area where they are particularly bad. That just happens to be the editor - the main component every developer works with!

Now, an editor is the main tool every programmer uses. Without a good editor, you are simply wasting your time. Most people will probably say that IDE editors are great because they have some form of code generation and type checking.

While that may be slightly true, the editor still is the most un-feature-rich part of all IDEs. The refactoring support may be useful, but it does not aid you in writing the text that is your logic. The IDE is nothing more than a simple text editor that has some hooks allowing you to see type errors / syntax problems / etc.

So what can we do about it? Sadly not too much :P The IDE frameworks are generally monstrous and do not allow for much customization. It seems strange to say, but Emacs got it right. An editor that allows the user to customize it completely. Similar efforts are going into Sublime Text 2 (which has Python at the core) and obviously VIM (with VIMScript). These editors are what people should be using to make themselves more productive. If the editor is missing something like a snippet expansion etc, the person using the editor can just implement it themselves and more importantly, share it with the world on GitHub :)

So what does an awesome editor, something like Emacs, not have? This is what IDEs have tried to solve, but mostly very badly. It simply needs the interaction with the compiler and/or linting system. One technology that enables this is the SWANK protocol. The SLIME mode in Emacs uses it and the Clojure guys have managed to use it to create very nice tooling for Clojure.

ENSIME is another gem, it is a server (and Emacs mode) that caters for Scala and to a lesser degree Java. This means that the SWANK protocol is all that is needed for an editor to get these features (along with the editor actually being able to use this data in some way. ENSIME has very advanced Emacs support and integration is currently underway for Sublime Text 2 and for Vim. Very good stuff.

The point is, people find reasons to blame the IDE. Agreed, its a valid complaint and you have to wait for a while for the fix to propagate into the next release. Unfortunately, software like eclipse is, simply put, very, very poor. I don't care about the notion of a "workspace" and neither should the IDE / editor. Let me write my programs effectively, thats all I as a "professional" ask for. Let the stupidity die and lets really move forward!