"I see Visual Studio get a lot of support on HN, so maybe I am just weird, but I've never enjoyed using Visual Studio as a whole."
Me neither. I switched from Visual Studio (C#) to Emacs (Common Lisp) -- and a short stint on the AllegroCL IDE -- and I do not miss Visual Studio one bit. It always struck me as odd to see Visual Studio getting praised here. I can only assume it fares better than Netbeans or Eclipse?
I can't speak for everybody, but I always rated Visual Studio because of its zero-effort code navigation and code completion. (No setup required, and it's surprisingly good at seeing through common preprocessor tricks.) The debugger is pretty good, too, the text editing experience is fine, the whole thing is 99% operable via keyboard, and the scripting language is bearable.
This probably doesn't sound like a rousing endorsement, but I've yet to find anything that's as good for reading and writing C, C++ or C# code.
(People using Visual Studio for anything else should definitely consider shopping around, though as general-purpose text editors go it is far from the worst possible.)
Agreed. I used to think that I didn't like VS because I also didn't like .NET. I still don't like .NET, but after using other IDE's for other languages (primarily Jetbrains' products) I have grown to dislike it even more.
It feels like the Internet Explorer of IDE's to me. I am not sure whether or not my distaste is justified since I am well aware that it is a powerful IDE, I just hate how bloated it all feels. That and its incredibly annoying that once I wish to uninstall it, I end up having to uninstall about 20 other programs too. Very obnoxious.
Me neither. I switched from Visual Studio (C#) to Emacs (Common Lisp) -- and a short stint on the AllegroCL IDE -- and I do not miss Visual Studio one bit. It always struck me as odd to see Visual Studio getting praised here. I can only assume it fares better than Netbeans or Eclipse?