[rtfeldman]

I can't speak for others, but for me, the main thing that has kept me away from IDEs is lag. Every IDE I've ever used (IDEA, Eclipse, NetBeans, Visual Studio) has always interrupted my workflow on a regular basis in order to recompile something or update some index or other.

In statically typed languages, that's often a tradeoff I'm happy to make; IDEs give you a lot more information than text editors in that case. But in a dynamically typed language, where I'll need to run the program to find errors anyway, the lag is just a nuisance.

As I've primarily worked in dynamic languages for the last several years, I've had no desire to put up with IDE lag for minimal gain.

[Osiris]

It seems the main question here is cost/benefit. For me, IDEs provide a lot of useful tools. For example, I love being able to hit a single key to jump to the source definition of a function call. It makes it super easy to trace program flow. ST doesn't do that (ctags plugin doesn't really help).

IDEs can be great when they understand your code well enough to do things like renaming all uses of a function, refactoring, applying code-style formatting, highlighting errors in code (I've caught a lot of errors from co-workers that use ST, while my IDE clearly highlights the bug), etc.

In cases where code is harder to analyze, like JavaScript, IDEs can be far less useful.