Visual COBOL ships with the Eclipse IDE as its development environment.

Eclipse is an integrated development environment (IDE) that many non-COBOL programmers are very comfortable using. This familar IDE has helped programmers who are new to COBOL and/or Unix make an easier transition.

But if you are new to Eclipse, then you also face a learning curve. 

While learning the syntax of the Eclipse IDE, you can still continue to use the same methods that you used with Server Express. You can sign onto the Unix box directly and use vi, emacs, etc.  From the commandline, you can: set the environment variables, compile using the 'cob' command, run your code using 'cobrun', animate, etc.

While your goal will be to get up to speed using Eclipse to unlock all the features of Visual COBOL, you can still use familiar ways to make any immediate changes to your code while you are learning the syntax of the Eclipse IDE.