It isn't a full-blown IDE and in reality it never intended to be so.
What it really is is a powerful professional text editor.
Sadly it only has versions for Windows and DOS.
Even under Windows it isn't a GUI application.
It runs as a console window and thats OK!
No regrets, unless you're too lazy! ;-)
TSE:
Is fast! Very fast! Very much faster!
Much faster than any GUI editor you may know.
Is very, if not completely, customizable!
Its degree of customization is unbelievable.
Is possibly more powerful than VIM.
But certainly orders of magnitude easier to master.
TSE's internal macro language is very familiar and easy to learn.
To better understand its capabilities, check its features!
Trying to compare NetBeans' editor against TSE is unfair!
The NetBeans' degree of keyboard customizations is a joke.
TSE wins by far. But NetBeans wins as an IDE, of course.
But regarding text editing the game is over, TSE wins.
Even if you have a UNIX box for compiling and running, it would be advisable considering a (local or remote, virtual or not) Windows box just for the editing activity taking advantage of the superior text editing capabilities of TSE.
OPINION
In fact, the more professional you get, the less you need all those bells and whistles for text editing and building. You power and productivity will bias towards the bare bone tools without all those layers of fat of GUIs. Nevertheless, IDEs such as NetBeans survives because they integrate quite a lot of other goodies that may be important at some point of a project, remembering that if a project is growing extremely complex then there's probably some flaw or something wrong with its original design and/or engineering. The industry is rich of such defects, ranging from operating systems to all kinds of services and applications. That's all about Quality which is frequently sacrificed for Economic Pressures. And, by the way, much of this has to do with why I'm not fond of DOS, Windows, .NET, Java, Visual Studio, NetBeans and so on, on and on... All full of fat, overheads and inefficiencies and flaws which frequently require a lot of fixes, including security patches. One generally spends a great deal of time and money with maintenance to get a proportionally much lower ROI. A nightmare, in fact, a regularly employed deceiving strategy. I do not agree with this status-quo. I believe that systems and applications could be much more efficient and present much greater quality than they exhibit today.
