Most of the time you don't even need the documentation, as methods are named well enough that they describe their behavior. This is simply much faster than opening another window and doing a google search. The times you do need the docs, a hotkey will open a full window for it.

I'm with you on the crap flying around on every other keypress though. Feels like I'm programming with an extreme case of ADD.

Stockholm syndrome.

Try Visual Studio for a month. At first you'll be like "get out of my way stupid intellisense popup" and then you'll be like "holy crap that just saved me 60 seconds... for the 60th time today." And then you go home early and use that free time to have sex with your wife.

Point being, it'll change your life for the better.

I was forced to use Visual Studio in school, I hated it throughout and took every chance I could get to use Python or Ruby or something else with a unix-y stack.

Trying it again now would be pretty far out of my way just to reaffirm what I already know, since of course I've long since left Windows entirely.

Visual studio has changed a lot since 2008. VS2010 is actually surprisingly good. Personally I prefer it over any other IDE I've ever used, such as eclipse.

As you said, since you don't use windows, there's no point in you using it. But let me just say that it certainly sucked at one point, but it is now one of Microsoft's best products, IMO. They've definitely done a LOT of work to improve it.