智能感知、集成调试器和即时窗口使我的工作效率大大提高(Visual Studio 2008)。有了一切触手可及的东西，我可以在写代码的时候把一个庞大项目的绝大部分都记在脑子里。微软可能一直在他们的操作系统上犯错，但是Visual Studio是有史以来最好的产品之一。

简单地说，IDE提供了比简单编辑器更省时的特性。

我从相反的方向来回答这个问题。我从小就在Makefile+Emacs的环境中编程。从我最早的DOS编译器，微软的Quick C，我有一个IDE自动化的事情。我在Visual c++ 6.0上工作了很多年，当我毕业到Enterprise Java时，我使用Borland JBuilder，然后决定使用Eclipse，这对我来说已经变得非常高效。

Throughout my initial self-teaching, college, and now professional career, I have come to learn that any major software development done solely within the IDE becomes counterproductive. I say this because most IDE's wants you to work in their peculiar I-control-how-the-world-works style. You have to slice and dice your projects along their lines. You have manage your project builds using their odd dialog boxes. Most IDE's manage complex build dependencies between projects poorly, and dependencies can be difficult to get working 100%. I have been in situations where IDE's would not produce a working build of my code unless I did a Clean/Rebuild All. Finally, there's rarely a clean way to move your software out of development and into other environments like QA or Production from an IDE. It's usually a clicky fest to get all your deployment units built, or you've got some awkward tool that the IDE vendor gives you to bundle stuff up. But again, that tool usually demands that your project and build structure absolutely conforms to their rules - and sometimes that just won't work for your projects' requirements.

我了解到，要与团队一起进行大规模开发，如果我们使用IDE开发代码，并使用手动编写的命令行脚本进行所有构建，那么我们可以获得最高的效率。(我们喜欢用Apache Ant进行Java开发。)我们发现在IDE中运行我们的脚本对于复杂的构建来说只是一个点击或者自动化的噩梦，用alt+tab到一个shell并在那里运行脚本要容易得多(而且破坏性更小)。

Manual builds requires us to miss out on some of the niceties in the modern IDE like background compilation, but what we gain is much more critical: clean and easy builds that can live in multiple environments. The "one click build" all those agile guys talk about? We have it. Our build scripts can be directly invoked by continuous integration systems as well. Having builds managed through continuous integration allows us to more formally stage and migrate your code deployments to different environments, and lets us know almost immediately when someone checks in bad code that breaks the build or unit tests.

In truth, my taking the role of build away from the IDE hasn't hurt us too badly. The intellisense and refactoring tools in Eclipse are still completely useful and valid - the background compilation simply serves to support those tools. And, Eclipse's peculiar slicing of projects has served as a very nice way to mentally break down our problem sets in a way everyone can understand (still a tad bit verbose for my tastes though). I think one of the most important things about Eclipse is the excellent SCM integrations, that's what makes team development so enjoyable. We use Subversion+Eclipse, and that has been very productive and very easy to train our people to become experts at.

For me, an IDE is better because it allows faster navigation in code which is important if you have something in your mind to implement. Supposed you do not use an IDE, it takes longer to get to the destination. Your thoughts may be interupted more often. It means more clicks/more keys have to be pressed. One has to concentrate more on the thought how to implement things. Of course, you can write down things too but then one must jump between the design and implementation. Also, a GUI designer makes a big difference. If you do that by hand, it may take longer.

至于我为什么使用IDE，简单的回答是懒惰。

我是一个懒惰的人，当有简单的方法时，我不喜欢用困难的方法来做事情。IDE使生活变得简单，因此吸引了我们懒人。

当我输入代码时，IDE会自动检查代码的有效性，我可以突出显示一个方法并点击F1以获得帮助，右键单击并选择“转到定义”以直接跳转到定义的位置。我按下一个按钮和应用程序，与调试器自动附加启动为我。这样的例子不胜枚举。开发人员每天所做的所有事情都集中在一个屋檐下。

不需要使用IDE。只是不这么做要难得多。

基于gui的ide(如Visual Studio和Eclipse)比基于文本的ide(如Emacs或vim)有几个优势，因为它们具有显示功能:

所见即所得预览和实时编辑的GUI设计 高效的属性编辑器(例如;使用GUI调色板选择颜色，包括定位渐变停止等) 代码概要、文件相互关系等的图形化描述 更有效地使用屏幕空间来显示断点、书签、错误等 更好的拖放支持操作系统和其他应用程序 集成编辑图纸、图像、3D模型等 显示和编辑数据库模型

基本上，使用基于gui的IDE，你可以在屏幕上获得更多有用的信息，你可以像查看文本部分一样轻松地查看/编辑应用程序的图形部分。

作为开发人员，最酷的事情之一是编辑一个计算一些数据的方法，并看到代码的实时输出以图形方式显示在另一个窗口中，就像你的用户在运行应用程序时看到的那样。现在，这就是所见即所得编辑!

基于文本的ide(如Emacs和vim)可以随着时间的推移添加代码补全和重构等特性，因此从长远来看，它们的主要限制是基于文本的显示模型。