- Visual studio 2012 (with added plugins)

If I recall correctly, VS Express doesn't have plugins, so you have the Professional edition... right?

VS is clunky out of the box, but with plugins it can become pretty nice. (Even if it still kind of sucks at editing text.) If you don't have Visual Assist X already, get it. It's not too expensive for what it does.

 

Others are not even close.

 
I wonder with this statement if you even used other IDEs. Or you must mean that other IDE don't come close because they are already far ahead. But when it comes to code editing, Visual Studio is probably the least innovative and modern IDE you can think of. The main strong point of VS is the debugger, but for writing code it's horribly unproductive to work with VS (at least with the basic product without plugins).

Some things I'm missing from Visual Studio that for example QtCreator has natively:
- Smart indention (copy/paste a piece of code into a scope with different indention and it automatically adds or remove tabs for you, rather then manually select all lines and press tab several times).
- Pointer recognition (press . after a variable that is a pointer and it is replaced with -> automatically).
- Automatic closing quotes/brackets for literals/function calls/scopes/includes.
- Hotswap between cpp/header (VS only has this for cpp>header using context menu).
- Hotswap between declaration/implementation (VS only has separate go to definition/declaration that is still slow and buggy with large projects).
- Syntax highlighting is still limited in VS without plugins, although it's catching up with 2012.

Basically, when it comes to writing code, I find using plain old Visual Studio without third party plugins bad for your productivity.

Some things I'm missing from Visual Studio that for example QtCreator has natively:
- Smart indention (copy/paste a piece of code into a scope with different indention and it automatically adds or remove tabs for you, rather then manually select all lines and press tab several times).
- Pointer recognition (press . after a variable that is a pointer and it is replaced with -> automatically).
- Automatic closing quotes/brackets for literals/function calls/scopes/includes.
- Hotswap between cpp/header (VS only has this for cpp>header using context menu).
- Hotswap between declaration/implementation (VS only has separate go to definition/declaration that is still slow and buggy with large projects).
- Syntax highlighting is still limited in VS without plugins, although it's catching up with 2012.

Basically, when it comes to writing code, I find using plain old Visual Studio without third party plugins bad for your productivity.

None of those things would be particularly hard to implement (on top of the intellisense engine they already have, anyway). I think the only reason Microsoft hasn't added them is because they would put Visual Assist X (which includes all of your bullet points) out of business.

Im not really sure, I'd have to say codeblocks even still, because you can use a cross platform wxWidgets toolkit for GUI stuff which does allot more than .NET framework controls. It can do MDI and allow docking floating panels, it also has a Scintilla wrapper, which is like a code editor with the line numbers and stuff and it can be customized and parses pretty much all of the known languages, being XML HTML C# C++ Java Basic you name it. But if you really just want an easy to use game programming IDE and language for only Windows development, use XNA & Visual C#.

I think you're confusing a lot of different concepts into this discussion. There is a question about what IDE to use on the table but most of your responses have been why cross platform solutions are better than Windows solutions (which may be perfectly valid, but just seems a bit off topic). OpenGL was something you mentioned, that can be used with any IDE. wxWidgets is a valid toolkit suggestion for GUI stuff, but again, that can be used from any IDE.

Visual Studio doesn't limit you to the .Net framework and CodeBlocks isn't the only avenue to wxWidgets.

I think the OP has gotten the best available suggestions available on IDEs so I have nothing new to add on that front.