It's really VERY simple. But this answer is a bit of a paradox in that I am discussing something only EMBEDDED level developers ever encounter. The reason this is an odd view is that frankly when I was doing embedded work (the brief time I was making any real money) an IDE would be down right STRANGE and most of your coworkers would wonder why you can't remember enough about SNMP/ASN.1 or whatever protocol you were dealing with to just /do your job/. BUT you can NOT, as far as I know, do a graphical simulation of what your microcontroller is doing in something like /real time/ without an "IDE".

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.

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。

对我来说，这肯定会提高我的工作效率。我甚至在Vista上的Visual Studio中编写Linux应用程序，然后使用Linux虚拟机来构建它们。

你不需要记住函数或方法调用的所有参数，一旦你开始输入它，IDE就会告诉你需要什么参数。您可以使用向导来设置项目属性、编译器选项等。您可以在整个项目中搜索内容，而不仅仅是当前文档或文件夹中的文件。如果你得到一个编译器错误，双击它，它会直接把你带到有问题的行。

集成了模型编辑器、连接和浏览外部数据库、管理代码“片段”集合、GUI建模工具等工具。所有这些东西都可以单独使用，但是将它们都放在同一个开发环境中可以节省大量时间，并使开发过程更有效地进行。

使用ide的一个很好的理由是，它们是生产现代软件的公认方式。如果您不使用，那么您可能会使用“老式”的东西，如vi和emacs。这可能会导致人们得出结论——可能是错误的——你被困在自己的方式中，无法适应新的工作方式。在软件开发这样的行业——创意可能在短短几个月内就会过时——这是一种危险的状态。这可能会严重损害你未来的工作前景。

我喜欢IDE，因为它能在我的指尖提供很多功能。编辑/编译/项目中文件的可见性是我在IDE中所看重的一切。我现在使用Visual Studio，但在以前我使用slikedit，并发现它使我的开发过程比我不使用它时更流畅。