Multiple vendors once tried to impose Eclipse-based
development methodologies on a group of engineers with which I
used to work. There were some objections, which were met by
management with the usual, daft assumption that the engineers
must not have tried IDEs before, and did not appreciate how
"powerful" they were. Once of my coworkers responded, very
wisely I think, that with Vim on Linux, his whole system was
an IDE.
Of course, there are various extensible editors; the important
thing is that the editor interacts smoothly with the rest of
the system, as opposed to the IDE philosophy of trying to make
one tool do everything on its own.
The point is that regardless of the rest of the system, you'll
be spending 90% or more of your time in the editor. So it had
better be good. Not just for C++, of course, but for all of the
rest as well. (Which is difficult, because I don't know of an
editor which is good for English HTML requirement
specifications, C++ and UML.) The second important thing is
that the build system be flexible with regards to integrating
automatically generated code; practically speaking you can't
communicate with the outside world without it, and it also makes
a lot of internal jobs easier. And you'll want a powerful
scripting language, for all of the repetitive maintenance jobs.
Those are the criteria. Beyond that, I'm used to using a
command line interface, and find it faster than navigating
through three or four menus, but that's a personal choice; both
should be available.
