To each its own, but last time I tried to use it (was quite a while ago) I felt an urge to murder somebody because of minor GUI issues and slow response time. The main GUI issue was wasted screen space. There's no place for "fancy", "stylish" or "nice looking" buttons or controls in programmers tools, because all graphical bells and whistles slow program down, and eat away screen space you could use for code editor. Maybe IDE has improved since, but I already given it a try in the past, and if it couldn't meet my requirements then, there will be no other chance.

Judging by my past experience with Code::Blocks and current screenshots, it is a toy. It tries to mimic VC6 (dumb idea), and needlessly wastes screen space with graphical embellishments (non square page captions, etc). You can concentrate only on ONE task at any given moments, so there's no reason to keep multiple windows visible at top level at once - they will simply distract you and take space you could give to code editor. However, you should be able to summon any window with a single keyboard chord and dismiss it with single "ESC" keypress. And this action should not resize code editor. IDE that does not understand that idea is not worth using.

Templates are useless - if you're creating "special" project, you should be familiar with requirements - libraries, compiler flags, and toolchain.

In my experience, the most efficient combo on any platform is any code editor (msvc on windows, kate on linux) that supports proportional fonts + orthodox file manager (mc/FAR Manager) + CLI build system(scons/qmake) + CLI version control (git) + gnu basic shell tools (diff/touch/sed/find/etc). On linux you can optimize this further by using separate virtual desktops for building, editing code, reading documentation, and controlling music player (you'll need to assign hotkeys to "switch to desktop X" and "send application to desktop X" for every desktop). Using IDE to maintain build order and keep to track of files in a project is not very efficient, because creating or adding any file in any IDE is too slow - you'll have to walk through several menus. It'll be faster to switch to CLI/file manager and type "touch File.h", then add it to git. If you insist on using IDE for code editor, then "project" for the ide should be generated by build system (qmake/cmake can generate *.vcproj files for msvc), since it'll be faster than trying to keep track of files through IDE. Also, since all IDE projects are incompatible with each other, using external build system will save time if you decide to switch to something else.

I use vim for all programming, though I am sometimes a bit jealous of IDE users for their auto-completion features in heavy-template C++ code. But I came a long way and actually learned programming with Text User Interfaces like Borland Pascal and GUIs like MS Visual C++ and Netbeans later on.

I voted IDE

I am one of those who uses an IDE, Netbeans in my case, for large PHP projects, I find it useful to keep all the relevant files together and I find that the IDE's code-completion capabilities, helps to speed things up for me, especially now I am working with PHP frameworks.

IDE's can be a bit difficult to pick up initially but I feel it is probably worthwhile getting to know one for the reasons I mention above.

For small edits I use Cream which is a variation of GVim

I see that Geany has been mentioned a few times that's a great IDE/Text Editor to learn, it's very lightweight, so runs very quickly, I may start using that myself.

gedit is the best....

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Yes I would agree with that tarunchawla,

gedit is a good text editor, but I tend to work primarily in Windows and dual-boot into Linux, I prefer Linux, but use Windows for some of the Games I enjoy playing

Vim for programming, grocery lists, small things

Open Office's Writer for letters and large things.

I use kate as a general purpose programming editor, Stani's python editor for my python projects. And bluefish for HTML/XML/CSS/PHP work.

I got to this link via email. I'm guessing that the voting is related to programming. I really like plain old vi. Probably since I learned it as a system admin with AT&T system V. I used C a little, (well you know UNIX and all). I really didn't/don't do much programming. I like vi as a text editor.