We describe a high-level approach to the construction of software development environments (SDEs) featuring a new degree of automation. It combines a variety of reuse approaches into one powerful machinery. Based on suitable specification formalisms (context-free grammars as well as graph rewriting systems), generator tools, and a framework implementation, the IFSEN meta environment allows the construction of software development environments supporting textual and graphical editors, analyzers, and other complex tools. The meta environment itself has also been bootstrapped from specijkations and the framework.