I agree with Paul, and I want to make it clear that I didn't want to imply that Emacs is "just" an editor (in which case I wouldn't be a member of this mailing list). My current opinion (if anybody cares) is that there are some development related tasks that IDEs tend to handle with dialogs and graphical features when it would have been more efficient to bypass the GUI and use key strokes to initiate and some simple text input mechanism to complete. Here, IDEs do poorly, and Emacs/JDE provides a stronger solution.
In contrast, there are some tasks that are better handled through a GUI. For example, GUIs are better for doing things like browsing an RMI registry to see which objects are registered, managing a set of web servers which you execute your web apps on, or displaying data about how HTTP requests are processed by the servlet engine. So I think some IDE type tasks can, and even should, be handled by editor extensions, while others are best done through a bona fide GUI framework. Which means that the combination of Emacs/JDE and Netbeans is actually pretty much ideal from my perspective :) Ana
