What is the IDE of choice for Erlang development?

Emacs is the IDE of choice. It supports Distel which plugs your editor into a cluster of Erlang Virtual Machines as an Erlang node in its own right (maaan!).

While there are several choices of plugins for NetBeans or Eclipse, the officially recommended IDE is Erlang mode for Emacs

Eclipse does the job just fine for me with the Erlang plugin. If you are already familiar with that through Java development why not simply stick with that?

I have also used JEdit and it performs pretty well.

Both are pretty good at syntax highlighting and have templates for new modules (OTP etc.).

Although I agree that Emacs is the "official" editor of choice you don't have to use it (and learn a whole new editing approach) if you don't want to.

If you are a new emacs user, I think emacs can really kill you :(

I try erlide(buggy for jump to defination, other is good) emacs-erlang mode(really hard for me), I finally choose sublime text2 for daily development. I suggest you can try it.

i install the following plugins:

package control
sublime-erlang
sublimerl
ctags

that's as good as I expected.