I've used MATLAB my entire professional life, never met a user not using the IDE. This is amazing to read. Perhaps a Matlab central article is warranted to describe this setup.
I bet that someone like Ned Gulley might be interested in writing a MC blog entry on that subject! He’s super nice/approachable, and can be emailed at his contact info on his profile*
The original generation of MATLAB creators and developers like Cleve tended to come from an academic UNIX/mainframe/HPC type background, and so they were big CL users and lived in vim/emacs. And that carried over to a lot of the programmers working at The MathWorks to this day.
For a lot of engineers I worked with who hack on the “guts” of the products (the language parser/interpreter/JIT, math internals, computational geometry and stats libraries, etc), the only time they’d fire up the IDE was at the pre-release bug bash every six months lol!
In my original post, saying the “majority” of TMW ran this way is probably an exaggeration, but a “sizeable minority” would be true.
Maybe Ned could run an internal poll and include those results in the blog post :)