My feeling is that several editors get over looked because they don't have a cool IDE in their title, while they perform many of the same functions. IDE is also a term that is up for debate, Komodo is billed as an IDE, but it doesn't provide access to any revision control systems, I don't consider that a full featured IDE, I still use it, but I have to rely on outside utilities to work with CVS.

Some editors are the only option in some cases. If a person knows which programs are available on different platforms it might allow them get a small change done without having to go back to their "normal" environment. I have dealt with this first hand. I had a project that stipulated I couldn't install any editors* on the system and because of that I had to use WordPad to write the application.

I have also watched people that couldn't fix a problem on site because they were too dependent on the editors features to know how to do it the "old fashion" way.

So I recommend that people become comfortable with command line and complete GUI IDEs on multiple platforms so they don't get stuck without an editor, advice I need to follow better since I still get bitten from time to time.

* This was a major corporation with a very well maintained network and I was working on a workstation and not a server at the time. I didn't have an option because I was inside of their secure facility, there wasn't anyway to do the testing on my own machine because I wasn't allowed to connect to their network with outside equipment. They have since modified the rules and brought in a dedicated Linux box to host the application (completely Perl based), on which I primarily use SciTE to edit. For ones own sanity I don't recommend prolonged coding in WordPad.

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