VisualStudios was my main IDE until I started web development and moved to Linux. For more than a year now, I’ve been using Eclipse because their plugin system has enabled people to create really good editors for Java, PHP, Javascipt, Flex and HTML/CSS. Because it’s all in one program, the editor is really heavy and fairly bug prone. Recently, I’ve been making the switch from using Eclipse exclusively to moving most of my development to Vim.

Vim is a very good text editor and I chose it ahead of Emacs because in my opinion, the commands are simpler. Most of the common functionality of Eclipse can be found in Vim: search/replace, syntax highlighting, XDebug-ing, and much more. The debate between gui editors or vim/emacs is basically a moot point. They are just tools. Certain people’s thinking patterns are just more suited to one tool than the other. Since I use the command line for almost everything I do, using vim allows a much easier transition between editing files, writing scripts and interacting with remote hosts. For me, vim, along with all of the standard linux apps (find, grep, tail, ssh, scp, etc…), allows me to work more efficiently than any other tool so that is what I use.