xterm wrotePlease let's not compare Emacs and VI and any other 'text editor' to a fully blown enterprise level IDE. Memory hog or not. I do not know what applications you've built using visual studio but my instance has never gone over 345mb for building a solution with 50+ projects with over 100,000 lines of code.
If you're one of those people that are handicapping yourselves with 1gb of ram, then stick to your text editors but don't blurt out nonsense.
What does Visual Studio have that Vi doesn't?
Vi gives me all I need from a text editor and much more:
* Multiple files at the same time through both tabbing and split screens.
* Syntax highlighting for every language possible.
* Auto-completion for every language.
* Not only can I call compilers, debuggers, interpreters, ... but also any command from the command line (copy, move, ...)
* File manager to manage the project tree.
*
Huge increase in productivty and typing speed, since hands never leave the keyboard (not even the arrows).
Emacs scripting capabilities make it virtually capable of doing anything. It's a fact, and there's a plethora of plugins available to do everything, from RSS feed reader to mail client.
1GB today is still very reasonable memory. I bought my laptop 4 years ago, it shouldn't be considered "outdated". And 350Mb is huge, especially considering the 500+ needed for Vista for example.
Vim is so light, I can access it on my server by ssh. It also teaches you to compile from the command-line which is beneficial.
I wrote an article about this on my blog.
So tell me
What is the advantage of an IDE again, if not the memory hog, huge license fee and platform-dependancy?
I say if you are willing to learn either Vi or emacs, you'd never go back to IDEs.
xterm, I remember you saying that you used Vi exclusively for a while, I'd be interested to hear the reasons why you switched back.