When I first started taking classes, I tried using eclipse. I decided rather quickly that, especially in a classroom setting, IDEs were a crutch and if I wanted to become a good programmer they would do more damage than good. (Note I said good. That may or may not be the same as productive.) So I started learning vim. Now I can't use most environments. I use Xcode for iphone development, but otherwise I'm just too programmed for vi. I need my commands and macros. GDB works great once you learn it. Valgrind works great as well. And these are available on any *nix machine, all over an ssh connection.

We just had a programming exam where they give you three hours on an isolated machine to build a fairly simple program in C++. Most of the questions and problems people had were that their IDE of choice wasn't working for some reason. Meanwhile, using vim/gdb/valgrind I was done in an hour, long before anyone else.