When you start a board bring up activity from scratch, there are many challenges. The first of these challenges is the choice of the development environment. Is there any commercial agreement with an IDE Vendor? How flexible is debugging on the IDE and build time, code footprint after optimization etc are related concerns. If the choice is a command line based build environment, the developer is free to choose what features he needs and how easily he can customize it for his requirements.

In case of a Graphical development environment, the IDE takes that decision for you. There are many Graphical IDEs some are commercially licensed and some are available with opensource licenses. Eclipse based IDEs are very famous across the opensource licensed Graphical IDEs.