The evil of IDEs

I still remember the first time I opened a programming language IDE (Integrated Development Environment). It was "wow". All these bells and whistles to create a nice Form and make buttons work on it. It wasn't the first time I programmed, but I was simply amazed by all this stuff I saw. If you wanted to create a button... Drop it on the form! If you wanted to create a textbox.. Drop it on the form! Yeah, it was awesome. Then all this code support! Code completion, coloring, project management and so on! I still remember sitting hours in front of that IDE, just messing up with forms and writing code to change a labels text.

Now, I can't stand IDE's. They are terribly slowing my work progress. For example take Microsoft's latest Visual Studio. I mean seriously, what the hell? To write a simple "Hello World" program you have to create a project, which creates a lot of garbage files that no one really needs for such a small program, and it also pushes down it's own coding style down your throat, if you happen to have another coding style.

Surely, IDE's are not all that bad. Most of them have powerful debugging control, and some have even inline version control. But do you really need that much? It eats up a lot of ram, which is quite unfortunate, if you happen to work on an old computer like mine.
Thats why I use my somehow own IDE. That's a lot of programs together, opened only if I need them, and configured just as I like. I use these programs for example:

• Notepad++ for writing the actual code
  
• GNU Compiler, Debugger,Linker, Make and many other things for compiling my code (Mingw32)
  
• Doxygen for documenting my code
• Subversion for source code control
• Google Groups for project management
• Webcpp to convert code into html pages
• The interwebs to get all my information about programming
  
• The good old command line for random stuff

I really like Notepad++, as it is an awesome editor, exactly how I need it! You can even expand Notepad++, by adding plugins, or writing plugins yourself! (In the screenshot I use the Zenburn theme, which I converted to a Notepad++ style myself)

As you probably noticed, I use mostly open source or at least free products to help me write my code, and I don't use any fancy IDE to "help" me managing my code. I just use many programs and use them when I need them.

An IDE done right, by the way, is Dev-C++, as it doesn't require you to do fancy stuff before writing actual code, and you simply plug in features you need, and remove features you don't need. If I wouldn't have grown so much into my own development environment, I would clearly use Dev-C++.

Anyway, maybe you still have your own opinion about IDE's, and if you're comfortable with your own solution: use it. Use whatever you are comfortable with, as long as you write good code, and your IDE doesn't stop you from doing that, move on!