It really does sound like he doesn't want to learn new things.
"I've never figured out how to get Visual Studio or Eclipse to produce a compact list of all the places where a particular string occurs throughout a program."?
Come on. [in eclipse/variants] CTRL-H? Search menu for the blind?
The rest of the points are pretty general: Utility, availability, generality. This covers most good IDE's if you ask me.
What's needed is a study rather than an opinion. Compare two or more groups, experts in either emacs/vi + shell vs eclipse/visual studio and one common language. Look at the speed of completing basic tasks common to programming.
I would hypothesize that while differences amongst groups exist, no differences between means would be larger than a cohen effect size of 0.5
Question: What about when you need to do something that the IDE doesn't have built in?
(I use Emacs. Many years ago (mid 90s) I used the IDE that came with Turbo C++, but haven't used Visual Studio or Eclipse, and am genuinely curious how they handle extensibility.)
They don't handle it well. I haven't used Visual Studio in a few years, but Eclipse has plugins that you can get off eclipse-plugins.org. unfortunately, they are not all free :-( Emacs is certainly superior for most everything.
Honestly, I don't see it. It's been a while since I used emacs for development, but the entire reason I moved from emacs to eclipse was because I had at least a 10x improvement in productivity working with large [java] code bases.
Has jdee come a long way since? I just checked and it doesn't look like it.
As far as java on emacs, I can't exactly comment. Java is my one main exception to emacs. Its not that I dislike it on emacs, I just have never tried it there. I learned on Eclipse it worked for what I needed (although Eclipse is horribly slow...).
"I've never figured out how to get Visual Studio or Eclipse to produce a compact list of all the places where a particular string occurs throughout a program."?
Come on. [in eclipse/variants] CTRL-H? Search menu for the blind?
The rest of the points are pretty general: Utility, availability, generality. This covers most good IDE's if you ask me.
What's needed is a study rather than an opinion. Compare two or more groups, experts in either emacs/vi + shell vs eclipse/visual studio and one common language. Look at the speed of completing basic tasks common to programming.
I would hypothesize that while differences amongst groups exist, no differences between means would be larger than a cohen effect size of 0.5