Mountains of Abstraction

As part of my journey to distance myself from Microsoft et al and to the free pastures of open source development. During an uninstall I couldn’t help notice the gigantic size of Visual Studio 2008. I do not recall the exact number, but suffice to say it was possibly a Gigabyte or more; slight feeling of unease came over me. Does an IDE really need to be this big? To conclude that an IDE is nothing more than a glorified text editor would be both harsh and a slight exaggeration.