I have to stop using Spyder...

You don't have to follow the trend.
If you're satisfied with that, why don't you just keep using it?

You're totally correct =)

But I'm not satisfied with Spyder at all, it is heavy, buggy, can't handle multiple environments properly. I've started using it initially because company "imposed" Anaconda to everyone, then Spyder was the only option really and I got used to it. It does have its benefits, like quick interaction between the editor and the terminal, the inbuilt docs browser, but the results show that it is by far no at top of the list for the community.

So, my comment was more of a lesson to myself, to spare some time and at least try another tool to compare. I'm now trying to find my way in this VSC, but to be honest I'm quite disappointed with first impression. Will try it for a couple of weeks anyway.

By the way, I also use emacs most of the time for the mature projects I have. But for initial development and investigations, I prefer a "proper" IDE.

I'm glad you had that background.

This survey seems to be very useful in that we can find better tools. Most of all, it's fun.

Emacs: The editor for life.

After reading the final results, I decided to try the top 5 (excluding emacs, as I already know it wasn't written for me).

I used each of them for a day. Oké, I admit, some less, as it didn't work out at all (for me).

I returned to elvis (vi clone) after noting that none of the IDE added *any* features I wanted/needed/found missing in elvis.
Some of these were very hard to configure in a way *I* want to use an IDE. Why do people thing that a black background suits everyone? Having it be the default, oké, but making it hard to turn back to a usable light background and still have good contrast in syntax highlighting is obviously not of any importance for their maintainers, causing the product to disappear from my radar instantly. Likewise for (wrong) leading whitespace behaviours. Having to deal with truckloads of old code in many languages, leading whitespace can be anything: spaces, tabs or mixed, but a tab is always 8 spaces. Why do people even think a tab is 2 spaces wide? That will cause code with mixed leading whitespace into an unreadable mess instantly.

I really miss the old we-hate-software mailing list. There was *so* much to learn from complaints to make your own favorite product better by avoiding the pitfalls people complain about over and over again.

If you write an IDE that is *only* suitable for python or java and only supports chinese glyphs, please don't call it the best IDE available, because it isnt. (I chose that combination, because it doesn't match any of the top 5: fill in your own language(s) and/or encodings)

does Gigs of disk space count as a feature?

I propose to create an IDE called "No IDE" that can make it to the IDE of the year poll.

Here is my source code:

The sole purpose of this would be to hack the "IDE of the Year" poll, and figure out a way to get a sensible option on.
I used to use IDEs when I was learning how to program, I found that I learned more when I used the text editor + shell.
I did not even know how to build a project when I used the IDE (you hit the build button which is not present in the terminal)
The last IDE I used was Android Studio. I hate java so I was glad to get the beast off my hard-disk.