It’s cross-platform (Windows, Unix/Linux, BSD and OS X), open-source (GPL v2), and reasonably convenient to use. The best LaTeX editor I could find is TeXstudio. Their development is also not very active, which can cause problems when updating your IDE, and that’s just the kind of problems I don’t want to deal with. While (La)TeX plugins exist for both IntelliJ IDEA and NetBeans, they’re not very good. Being a software developer, my ideal solution would be an IDE I’m used to from my day-to-day development, such as IntelliJ IDEA or NetBeans. Having a flexible editor that you feel comfortable with is important.
I tried many different tools in my search for a stack that works on multiple platforms (I develop on Linux and OS X) and minimizes distractions from the content, which is what really matters. That takes a lot of time and in order to use it efficiently, you need a good environment for LaTeX development. Over the years, I wrote several hundred pages in LaTeX.
