> My laptop can run a full-featured IDE (IntelliJ) without breaking a sweat and it supports all the languages I need and then some.
I've had a quad-core desktop chug under Eclipse (employer required I use it) and still had to fall back to a real editor regularly.
> I guess I could go back to trying to hack together an IDE in emacs or vim with a bunch of buggy, half-supported third party plugins that interoperate poorly if at all, but why?
Well, mostly people use the well-maintained, integrated, and first-party ones instead. Each to his own, I suppose!
As opposed to IDEs, which are characterized by having tightly constrained domains and weak editing features beyond whatever language-specific functionality they bloat up their GUIs with.
I've had a quad-core desktop chug under Eclipse (employer required I use it) and still had to fall back to a real editor regularly.
> I guess I could go back to trying to hack together an IDE in emacs or vim with a bunch of buggy, half-supported third party plugins that interoperate poorly if at all, but why?
Well, mostly people use the well-maintained, integrated, and first-party ones instead. Each to his own, I suppose!