The perfect Java IDE

So it's been a while since I have been looking for the perfect Java IDE. To tell you the truth, I have tried a myriad of them. I have tried IDEs such as IntelliJ 5.0, Borland JBuilder Enterprise Edition 2005 bundled with Borland Together Developer 2005, Oracle JDeveloper 10i, Eclipse 3.0 and of course because I am using a Mac, I also tried BBEdit and SubEthaEdit.

To tell you the truth, the last 2 did not do a good job at giving me whatever I needed a good IDE to give me. In terms of the heavyweight IDEs, I particularly liked IntelliJ (for the amazing refactoring abilities), JBuilder (because of it's code profiling tool - Optimizit 2005 -) followed directly by Eclipse.

However most of those IDEs are written in Java and although I have a pretty powerful computer with a 1.5Gbs of ram I still end up getting angry waiting for a window or intellisense code-complete to popup (Eclipse in particular is a big memory/CPU hogger - I tell you! -). I have spent lots of time looking for a really cool IDE that would be written in C++ or C instead of being written in Java and to this point I still do not understand why most Java IDEs are written in Java, thus requiring the developer to have a really powerful machine in order to do something meaningful.

However I believe that my search is now over. Today I stumbled upon an article that was a tutorial about setting up VIM so that it makes java development a pleasure. I followed it and I have to tell you that I am switching completely. Following the tutorial, one actually gets VI to do stuff like proper java syntax highlighting, code complete, compilation of source files (using ant), javadoc referencing and all this in the fastest and most lightweight IDE ever! I am totally in love with it!

If you're interested in reading the article and trying it out for yourself, here's the link to it:

Configure vi for Java application development

I hope there are some guys out there who like me are tired of IDEs that are heavy on their hardware but still need something really decent for their java development projects and whom the above-cited article will be able to help.

Enjoy!