I have been using IDEs since I started programming.
I had started my programming with Basic and it's slick (ya...in those days, every interface which was like Lotus or Wordstar was slick) IDE. I remember one had to even type the line numbers along with the code. The next version - QuickBasic seemed revolutionary to me in those days.
After Basic, it was Pascal, C and C++ using Borland's Turbo IDEs for them. The whole process of creating projects, syntax highlighting, debugging with breakpoints and watches was way too cool and it seemed like there was nothing else one would want from an IDE.
The next set of IDEs that I used were from Visual Studio suite (this was version 5). VB5 introduced me to IntelliSense. And then I got so used to it that I wanted IntelliSense for VC++ 5 as well. But then VC++ 5 used to run pretty well on my good old 486 machine. I was really looking forward to IntelliSense for the C family when I switched to VC++ 6, but then it really ran so slow on my machine that I had to upgrade it (!). I have used VC++ 6 for the longest time (almost 5 years) and had got pretty familiar with it (I had programmed plugins and new project templates for VC++ 6 as well). In fact, when I switched to Visual Studio .Net 2003 (which was mostly because of the upgraded compiler rather than the IDE), I used to miss my earlier settings. Small things like a different plugin model and project templates totally made my custom utilities and third party plugins completely useless under VS.NET. In fact I was actually trying to use the VC++ 6 IDE with the VS.NET 2003 compiler by setting the compiler paths and everything else, but I could not debug using the VC++ 6 IDE. For debugging, I had to work with the new IDE. Nevertheless I made the switch. The IDE also had some cool features like code folding and Properties toolbar, but mostly uninteresting to me.
On courses where I had to use Java, I always used to fumble with IDEs. Visual SlickEdit was the closest IDE (if it can be called an IDE) that I could be comfortable with given my experience on the Visual Studio platform. It's similarity to the Visual Studio IDEs was quite remarkable and it was also fast compared to the other IDEs I was trying out at that time (I might add that I hated Visual Age, even though many of my friends liked it). And then Eclipse happened. It took the whole world of IDEs by storm. It was fast, refactorings were cool, had intellisense and excellent debugging features. In fact I was liking it so much that I really got excited when they introduced the CDT for Eclipse and that was the IDE of choice for my C++ programs on Linux.
Now I am working as a software developer using Java and Ant. Our project is a huge one (with over 4000 files). I tried using Eclipse and Visual SlickEdit. Eclipse completely gave up on the large number of files and I felt SlickEdit was missing some important features (after having used Eclipse). I was really missing my good old days with VC++. Then, IntelliJ came to my rescue. It had all the features of Eclipse (in fact I've been told that Eclipse has been trying to ape IntelliJ) and many more. The intelligent editing - just type a class name and it asks for importing the appropriate package or create that new class, just type a method name and it politely asks for creating new methods, excellent debugging, the best syntax highlighting in an IDE, more refactorings than in Eclipse, a built in GUI editor and many many more (
features). I have even changed the key bindings to the keys I had in VC++ and now I feel completely at home. In fact it is so feature rich that I wonder what more could one ask from an IDE.
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