What you say is correct, an IDE is just a text editor with a bunch of features tacked on, but those features lead to the environment becoming hungry for resources after every keyboard command you type.
It doesn't surprise me to find Eclipse using 1GB of RAM after a few hours of development.
My main development machine right now is a Macbook laptop, so I have limited resources in terms of RAM (2GB) and processor (2GHZ) and hate to see programs becoming greedy
Are you sure that it would still use 1GB if you ran a program that needed memory harder?
Chrome with thirty tabs -- switching to a tab I haven't looked at in a while sets the disk grinding and brings everything to a halt.
When I start up Outlook, or just click on Outlook after waking up the laptop, there's a couple minutes I can spend getting coffee, because it takes take that long to switch to another program and start using it. (Waiting for Outlook to finish starting up is another few minutes after that.)
Eclipse with fifty or more files open (damn these big Java frameworks) -- grind grind grind every time I switch between views, or at unexpected times while I'm typing.
I wish I knew more about Windows, because when I look at the processes in the Task Manager, their combined memory footprint is well under 2GB, but all my programs become nearly unresponsive while the disk goes grind grind grind grind grind... what the hell is that about?
Whether it's misconfiguration or some spyware crap my company installs on our laptops (I disabled the "backup" feature that just copy files around on the hard drive, but I'm sure there's more) it certainly helps if I keep the resource usage of my programs down.
tl;dr: As long as people are bothered by performance problems, they'll worry about the resource consumption of their tools.
I found it very helpful to actively and violently close down tabs. 4-5 is just about the ideal maximum. I keep a separate lightweight browser, Opera, open to API documentation, and firefox for other stuff. For wifi, I removed the internal one and use an external one. Whenever I need to focus, I close firefox without saving sessions and unplug the wifi.
When I go out to cafes for reading, I leave the wifi at home.
Opera is not particularly lightweight, even compared with Chromium. Check out Midori.
Maybe someone knows otherwise; but I think it is a fact of life that when you set your JVM to use (say) 1GB and keep a java app open and creating objects for long enough, it will tend to grow to 1GB rather than spend time running the GC.
Now that Sun is no longer I sure hope Netbeans doesn't go down the tubes.
It's true that Eclipse can be quite memory hungry, but if you let it eat some memory, it's features can be fast. Still, the standard configuration of Eclipse is a joke. If you are trying to edit files, Eclipse will hang all the time.
In recent days I play a lot with Vim. Even though I configured it to my needs, it still lags behind an IDE when it comes down to IDE specific features - e.g. search in a project: it's neither as comfortable nor as fast as an IDE in this area. (I'd like to be proven wrong on this feature, because that's the main thing that's bothering me) - But Vim is good in what it is: a text editor. And that's what I'm doing most of the time: editing text files.
As well, there is ctags, which basically builds up a list of function calls and where they are in a file. Vim understands tag files by default and will use them automatically. You can then toggle between the function declaration and your current line (useful for searching for functions' and what their parameters are).
Does the ctags plugin work for other languages as well, e.g. python, ruby, javascript?