Before Eclipse

OK, the tools I used when I was a programmer were these :

The OS (pretty much always VMS)
A scripting language (on VMS this is DCL)
A text editor (I used EVE almost exclusively)
A compiler
A linker
A debugger

Note that these things do not an IDE make. This was all command line based. This is the sequence I'd use to fix an error in a pascal program might be this ...

$ eve program.pas
make a change
save and exit

$ pasccal program.pas
get a compilation error

$ eve program.pas
make a change
save and exit

$ pasccal program.pas
get a compilation error

$ eve program.pas
make a change
save and exit

$ pasccal program.pas
get a compilation error

$ eve program.pas
make a change
save and exit

$ link program.pas

$ run program.exe
check results

$ run program.exe /debug
issue commands to display code viewer
find a line number
set breakpoint at line number
continue program execution

etc. etc. etc. Everything manual, a lot of time to complete each step. The editor and the code viewer in debug, for instance, were completely different tools. There was no pointing, so no tooltips, no clicking to set breakpoints, no selecting to evaluate expressions, no code completion.

So when I finally got around to using an IDE, Eclipse, last year, it was something of a revelation. I think Eclipse is superb. I'd briefly used Visual Studio on a C++ course somewhere around 2004, but then never got to use it again. And I hated C++, so I had no incentive to use it again. The benefit of the course was an intro to OOP, but at the time I still interpreted OOP in terms of Ada 83, which I'd used on OOD based projects.

I used Eclipse with Java.