An oldie but a goodie, both the post and the issue. IDE editors suck. Emacs as an IDE sucks. Somebody needs to get us out of this mess :-( Since I don't think emacs will ever be a decent IDE, I think the day will come when somebody writes a good programmer's editor that is designed for embedding in an IDE. Then people can build their everything-and-the-kitchen-sink IDEs around it, and programmers can use the same editor to edit source files in their IDE that they use for editing text files in their terminal sessions.