[yoodenvranx]

I think it really depends on the type of work you are doing.

- If you do low-level stuff like writing a hardware driver or a kernel module you will most likely be fine with a normal text editor because all in all it's not that much code

- My friends in a large PHP shop all use PhpStorm to work on large projects. They all tell me that you are way more productive in PHP with the specialized tools that PhpStorm offers. In the whole company there is not a single person who uses emacs or vi for PHP (a lot of them use vi for everything else, but not for PHP)

- I used to have a job where I had to switch between 2 dozen projects in the span of a few weeks and fix things. A proper IDE makes it much easier to navigate code you have never seen before. Without IDEs I would not have been productive in that sort of job at all

[LandR]

Absolutely this, I've worked on a project that was 450 assemblies and about 5 million lines codes split over a few thousands source files.

Without an IDE that can jump between those assemblies and source files it's an absolute nightmare.