There is no industry standard at all. What are you hoping to achieve from an IDE? For the most part I use vim for Perl and Ruby coding, but I've used IDEs for other languages in the past. My requirements for an IDE for C are very different from those for an IDE for Java, let alone for a language essentially integrated with the IDE like Smalltalk. Apart from the ancient and venerable VisualAge -- perfect for Smalltalk -- the best IDEs I've seen, in general, come from JetBrains (formerly IntelliJ, which is now the name of their Java IDE).
The line between editor and IDE blurs a bit but there are some IDE features which I rarely see provided by programmable editors like emacs and vim (and which can be quite difficult to provide for dynamic languages without executing them): - contextual code completion, for example method names on a given object (requires knowing what class / role that object is expected to implement/perform) - automated refactorings (e.g. "replace conditional with polymorphism" or "extract inner class") - workflow-based rather than simply file-based integration with testing, version control, issue trackers (and probably a load more but I have work I should be doing) You should consider which of these features are important to you, and in which languages. Additionally, what you expect to achieve from an IDE, and how patient you'll be when its half-arsed parser misunderstands some modern Perl concept or syntax. I suspect that, at least for Perl, you may be better served with a well configured GUI vim with a decent set of plugins, rather than an actual IDE. For Ruby, the same, but take a look at RubyMine anyway. For Java, IntelliJ is the best choice. That said, I've never used Visual Studio, which some seem to think is the best IDE around. PS: Win98SE and a 6 year old version of OS X? Did you just flush the outbox of an email client you hadn't looked at for a while? /joel On 17 January 2014 11:18, Andrew <london...@unitedgames.co.uk> wrote: > Looking to try using an Integrated Development Environment. > Is there an industry standard everyone uses and I should get familiar with, > or will any do? > > My previous experience is with NotePad and TextWrangler. > I've Windows98SE and OSX 10.5.8 [Leopard] ;-), and use both in tandem via a > KVM switch, XD. > > Thanks in advance, =). > > Yours, > Andrew. > > >