Call it a back-to-basics movement or simply professionals seeking the best tools to get the job done well and on time. With enterprises putting a premium on productivity, a quiet revolution among programmers is eschewing the heavy, feature-filled IDE and turning instead to the venerable standby: the code editor.
"The spark behind this growing trend comes down to control--enterprises tout IDEs as the development tool du jour, with supporters arguing that programmers will get more done if they can do all their work inside a single environment. But many programmers (especially experienced ones) prefer a markedly different approach, using code editors and pluggable modules, modes, or other extendibility features to pick and choose just the tools they need. They don't enjoy being shoved into a single development environment, and contend that IDEs are resource-intensive, slow, and have many more features than are really needed to get the job done..."
