When you've got 10 subprojects open and every few new lines of code you save your file, resulting in a build triggering a cascade of plugin actions and more than a few seconds of mouse spinning, then yeah IDEs are slow and clunky.

When my IDE stops working one morning because yesterday's system crash resulted in a plugin being unable to load properly and subsequently peppering me with dialog boxes or worse, crashing the IDE, then it is definitely clunky.

When I just want to do code browsing across 500,000 lines of code and it takes 2-3 seconds every time I hover over a symbol just to populate the object list, that is slow.

Your experience sounds great. My experience has been that every IDE configuration falls into rot after 6 months to a year or so and the whole thing needs to be deleted and reinstalled. That's also slow.

Meanwhile, vim+ctags+gdb have given me years of reliable service. More than once I've had an IDE collapse into a pile of errors and turned to my trusty basic tools, only to leave the IDE as the steaming mess that it turned into for weeks or even months as I just didn't need that browsing or inline debugging power at the time.

It seems to me that if you were to disable the plugins, then you're kind of back to the equivalent of vim+ctags+gdb functionality. So, when saying an IDE is slow and clunky compared to an editor aren't you comparing apples and oranges?

Have you considered disabling some of those plugins? the functionality they give you is not worth the performance hit. Using an IDE does not mean you can't use the terminal at all.