[Nursie]

Become agnostic/independent.

I use nano, gedit, eclipse, slick, sublime, whatever's on the machine I use at the place I work and available in the situation.

I don't think a good IDE holds you back, but if you can learn to live without one then you're probably ahead of the game.

That said, I'm just an old C hacker, so what would I know...

[gkoberger]

If you switch computers often, this isn't bad (although I've rarely met a machine that doesn't have vim installed). But outside that, what's the rationale?

There's a lot to be said for knowing keybindings, shortcuts, syntax highlighting, file menus, etc. I can program 2x times faster with my .vimrc than a fresh vim install.. and probably double that again with a strange editor I've never used. I'm not saying vim is better by any means, but rather that familiarity is.

[Nursie]

I'm a contractor so I switch roles and projects a lot. Much of the time the project is already in full swing and tightly bound to a particular IDE by the time I'm brought in (which is usually because something has gone very wrong and they need help).

I find that being as IDE agnostic as possible, rather than coming to rely on the features of any one IDE (or editor or whatever), helps me just dive in and get going faster.

Raw speed at churning out lines of code seems a lot less relevant to me as time goes on.