There have been several Erlang development tools: Erlang module for Emacs, for vim, and Erlide for Eclipse. Why I write another Erlang IDE based on NetBeans?
Erlang for Emacs runs smoothly on my computer, but the distel module can not communicate with Erlang node on my Windows XP, that means I can not have the auto-completion, go to declaration features working; Erlang for vim is not a complete IDE yet; Erlide hangs on my Windows XP too. So I write ErlyBird.
But I'm actually a vi fun, so I just download and install the excellent jVi module to ErlyBird, which is a fully functional vi environment with good performance. There is an article talking about vi integration with NetBeans, which can also be applied to ErlyBird.
I'm now with fun with Vi on ErlyBird on my daily job.
The biggest issue for ErlyBird currently is the rendering performance, which causes performance slowing down if you run ErlyBird a while. I'm not sure if this issue depends on Generic Language Framework module of NetBeans. After I get the new laptop which with 2G memory next week, I may do some profit analysis.
I've also written some code to talk with Erlang Node from ErlyBird, everything looks smooth too.
I'll fly to San Francisco next week, to meet my new and old friends there.
It seems that this has been a world you should mix Vi/Netbeans, Java/Erlang, Beijing/Vancouver/San Francisco, whatever, together? A dynamical, colorful, multi-culture world, you have to look for the truths carefully, continually.