6 Reasons to Use Netbeans IDE

Considering the number of plugins that exist for Eclipse, IDEA and NetBeans, the claim that emacs is more modular than all these IDE's is a bit absurd, don't you think?

> Like all great open-source projects, Emacs has a very active online community.

As do Eclipse and IDEA (NetBeans being a distant third, not so much).

> Working on a team or alone I like to use version control (Git mostly) to manage my work.

All the IDE's have git (and other revision systems) plugins. They all have their pros and cons and personally, I prefer to use an external tool (SourceTree) but emacs is unlikely to have an obvious advantage here.

> 2 - Browser REPLs

The Lisp eval mode and shell interaction are nice, but they are pretty limited to elisp and shell. All the IDE's have evaluation windows that let you run any arbitrary Java code, something that doesn't exist in emacs.

> 1 - Feature rich

Well, yes, all these tools have a lot of features.

It's interesting that you don't list the number one (and pretty much only) advantage that emacs has over any other text editor: macros. Macros are pretty much the only reason why I still use emacs today (\C-x(, \C-x) and \C-xe). And occasionally for small text files.

But for code, if you're not using a specialized IDE, you're not as productive as you could be.

Is modularity measured by plugin count alone? Or is it measured by something like how feasible it is to remove some of the core IDE logic and replace it with your own choice of logic?

Modularity is not measured in how many plugins you can have, but in what those plugins can do with your editor without stepping on each other's toes.

All your other criticism applies to the original text as much as to my comedy piece.

> The Lisp eval mode and shell interaction are nice, but they are pretty limited to elisp and shell.

No; go and check it out. I specifically wrote about browser REPLs. People wrote REPLs that connect to the browser and let you execute arbitrary JavaScript, as well as transfer HTML and CSS between Emacs and an open page. Check out Moz Repl and skewer-mode.

> All the IDE's have evaluation windows that let you run any arbitrary Java code, something that doesn't exist in emacs.

Well Emacs has it too. Just install a Java REPL. Or shell out from inside Emacs, like all the IDEs used to do.

> It's interesting that you don't list the number one (and pretty much only) advantage that emacs has over any other text editor: macros. Macros are pretty much the only reason why I still use emacs today (\C-x(, \C-x) and \C-xe).

Well, I don't find macros that important alone. Their power depends on having complex text selection, navigation and modification tools. Things like reverse incremental search (regexp or regexp-free version, whatever you like), skipping and selecting semantic units (sentences, paragraphs, s-expressions, etc.), expand-region, transposing, sorting, rectangle-operations, etc. And then there are things like ace-jump, multiple-cursors, etc.

The power and convenience of Emacs lies in all those features being readily available everywhere, one key press away. Emacs is a "total greater than sum of its parts" type of editor.