Unfortunately VS does so many things that Netbeans and Eclipse are it's only real rivals, but in terms of being an excellent IDE Qt Creator is fantastic to use, but it's very driven to just be excellent as a C++/Qt IDE.
Take a Java or C# project and tell me what you can do with the CLI. Auto completion? Re-factoring(grep and replace doesn't cut it)? Code generation? I said Java and C#, because I don't know which IDE people use for dynamic languages, and if it is possible to offer accurate completion without executing the code(in some cases, it won't work even with code execution but there was an article from the VS python guys(I think) about offering completion without executing code) and reliable re-factoring(this isn't doable at all without confirming with the user).
> Auto completion? Re-factoring(grep and replace doesn't cut it)? Code generation?
Auto-completion is an editor feature, and support for auto-completion in text-mode editors is not a problem, though I don't use it as I hate auto-complete with a vengeance. If you need to type enough for auto-complete to matter, your language and/or your identifier names are messed up.
Re-factoring and code generation are features I expect of the editor and/or external command line based generators respectively, and there's no reason for a heavy IDE.
I can understand people grab onto IDE's if forced to deal with ridiculously verbose languages like Java or C#, possibly. Yet another reason to stay away from these languages.
> Auto-completion is an editor feature, and support for auto-completion in text-mode editors is not a problem,
Which mighty text-mode editor would that be where auto completion is not a problem? I use Vim and Emacs on a regular basis and it's very much a problem except for cases where it's handled by external tools(eclim, gocode, vimclojure).
> though I don't use it as I hate auto-complete with a vengeance. If you need to type enough for auto-complete to matter, your language and/or your identifier names are messed up.
Programming languages benefit a lot from auto-complete. The only people against it are people who couldn't get it to work in their choice of environment. I have zero inclination to type "validates_numericality_of" or "http.ListenAndServe" or ...
> Re-factoring and code generation are features I expect of the editor and/or external command line based generators respectively, and there's no reason for a heavy IDE.
Please refresh your memory. I said VS is a good IDE and you said a solid CLI is far more productive. I am not interested in your rant. I am interested in what does CLI do better than the IDE, particularly VS or Eclipse.
> I can understand people grab onto IDE's if forced to deal with ridiculously verbose languages like Java or C#, possibly. Yet another reason to stay away from these languages.
Oh man. My environment doesn't have reliable autocomplete. Let's pretend only verbose languages need autocomplete. Yay.
Rails really doesn't do "IDE" well, but that's because its entire toolchain is built to be used independently of an IDE.
(Edit: There's Rubymine, which is actually pretty decent, but I usually just stick with Sublime and my console because it ends up being faster anyhow)