I started coding around 5 years ago. I was introduced through Java and Eclipse which both have substantial stigma attached in the programming community. A number of people at the company I currently intern at prefer emacs or vim. I can't see how a basic text editor is faster or easier than an IDE in general although I appreciate some things like building tend to be faster from the command line.
Is this a case of the 'old-boys' club or can it be more efficient to program a project in this way?
Can you provide some use cases to demonstrate? If I were advocating Eclipse I'd say refactoring and auto-completion were pretty handy tools.
Gav