I work on AAA games and I would love to go back to OSX and Emacs if only the tools and debuggers weren't exclusive to Windows and VS.

The UNIX philosophy is to compose stuff out of small tools. I think that you could see what most UNIX programmers use as an IDE, but it is just their personal combination of vi/emacs with refactoring tools (from primitive sed to eg Go's rename tool), etc.

We are working with certain expensive application, developed by one big multinational, that has virtual machine for extending the funtionality by the user (or more realistically, contractor).

The supplied IDE for development is Emacs.

Is it a GIS application?

Yes, it is.

If you look in my comment history you may be able to work out what I do. :-)

If you were sitting in Elisabeth House, there's a chance we met ;-)

Don't tell me that Smallworld is still started from Emacs???

It is an option. However, I'm one of those guys, who like it that way :-)

Doesn't have to be, and there is an Eclipse dev environment.

You can only speak for yourself. Lots of game developers, including myself, do not commonly use heavyweight IDEs.

1. Are you a professional--i.e., making rent off of it--game developer?

2. Are you developing for consoles or PCs, or for some other platform?

3. Do you program in a language that benefits from IDEs, specifically C, C++, C#, or Java?

Speaking for myself.

1. yes 2. yes 3. yes

Now, while I am forced to use Visual Studio as a build system and for it's integrated debugger. I too, generally use other tools for actual development. And I'd love if I didn't have to use VS for it's debugger either.

I'm genuinely curious--what problems have you had with the VS debugger? It's generally quite a bit nicer than the alternatives I've used.

It can only run from inside the IDE and requires extensive use of the mouse and GUIs. This is wasting precious screen space and the mouse is often slower than just typing and composing commands.

Also, since everything is tightly integrated, when something crashes the whole goes down. This can be frustrating when your project takes almost a full minute to load in VS (it's mostly VisualAssistX being busy parsing files and the perforce plugin syncing up).

1. Currently No, but for 5 years, yes. Now only indie in my spare time.

2. I was primarily developing for consoles (PS3, X360 mostly), with some PC work. Now primarily PC and Mobile.

3. Over 70% C or C++. In industry (AAA Console) I was probably 90% C++.

Lots of people do use IDEs in the industry, but lots of people also don't. It's a choice.

The first thing I do when beginning work with a new embedded platform is figure out how to bypass whatever wacky IDE its vendor wants their customers to use.

I am not sure many computer scientists care about the game development world apart from maybe VR+Other cutting edge prototypes that we could only benefit from if gaming funds it.

Very narrow minded and ignorant, typical of a certain type of developers. Video game development has contributed volumes to algorithm optimization, physics and physics approximation, computer graphics, design, industrial design, astrophysics, etc. Virtually every field of computer science.