Once you understand it's philososphy it is very powerful, but it has a large learning curve. For example, in other IDE's (like JBuilder, VisualCafe) you set the classpath explicitly, in Forte you don't, you need to mount the filesystems, this is not obvious.

Eclipse as I mentioned is less like any C/C++ tools as there is no explicit compile cycle, you save a method it is compiled.

IMHO, what is missing from all these tools is a good class browser. Coming from Smalltalk I lived in the class browser, where you could see the hierarchy and each method individually. A very good free tool is Teikade, which is a nice (albeit old) browser. You can find it here [link|http://www.pfu.co.jp/teikade/1.9/|Teikade] I use it extensively to look at source code such as the JDK source etc.