On the PHPFreak.de blog there's a new post talking about the author's quest to find the "holy development environment", the one that would make a developer most productive and give them the best features to do their work.

Over the last 8 years I've tried out a lot of different setups. I've always loved Emacs, and for many years my setup was very basic: Linux/FreeBSD desktop, Fluxbox, Xterm, Emacs and Firefox - simple and powerful, and I loved it but I want more. I want my environment to be a bit smarter and not just provide me with some (very, very nice) shortcuts for navigating my code.

He looks at a few other tools and how they compare to what he's used to - VIM, NetBeans, Eclipse PDT - and decides that there's not a clear winner between them and that really, it boils down to two things: what your preference is and what quirks you can deal with on a daily basis.