My IDE is too heavy so I moved to Emacs
&gt; ... apparently, writing code on anything other than top-of-the-line machines is too much to ask for.<p>You guys are way ahead of me, so I need to learn.  E.g., I&#x27;m missing the need for &quot;top of the line&quot;.<p>For my Web site startup, 
I typed in 100,000 lines of text, 24,000 programming language statements, in Microsoft&#x27;s Visual Basic .NET  using an old desktop computer with a processor with a single core with a with a 1.8 GHz clock, Windows XP, SQL Server, calling LINPACK via Microsoft&#x27;s <i>platform invoke</i>, and the editor KEDIT (with ~100 macros I wrote) with command line commands in ~100 Rexx scripts I wrote.<p>Once I got past some documentation frustrations, I was thrilled with all of it:  I typed in code using KEdit, compiled it using a Rexx script, then used another Rexx script to run it, e.g., to run the Web site <i>locally</i>, i.e., with IP address 10.0.0.177.<p>I thought that the compiling was fast, nicely fast, really, blindingly fast.  For the code to start running and the Web site to be functioning -- again blindingly fast.  I was thrilled.<p>Something went wrong, apparently with the motherboard, and I got an HP laptop with a 2 core processor and a 2.5 GHz clock
to use while I plugged together a desktop with an 8 core processor and a 4.0 GHz clock.  Then compiling the code and running it were faster than blindingly fast, nearly too fast to get finger off the Enter key.<p>I&#x27;ve considered moving to Emacs instead of KEdit and to Power Shell instead of Rexx, but so far I&#x27;ve not seen anything like<p>&gt; ... apparently, writing code on anything other than top-of-the-line machines is too much to ask for.<p>What am I missing?  Maybe I&#x27;m missing some big things an IDE (integrated development environment) would do for me?<p>I&#x27;ve been delayed by collecting data, etc., but am getting back to code writing and running so would like to know what I&#x27;m missing?<p>In simple terms, I see programming as just typing in text and like KEdit, and my macros, for that.  Then for the compiling, <i>building</i>, just run the compiler -- it runs right away.