I used to develop in emacs/jbuilder now I am fully in eclipse. I miss multiple copy buffers and good keyboard shortcuts. To me, the value added by the IDE - autocomplete, extra method, generate getters and setters, find references completely, utterly and totally blow text editors out of the water. I wouldn't waste my time reinventing the wheel on a new text editor. If I were super motivated, I'd write eclipse plugins to do whatever I needed. However, I work on an eclipse RCP based project to pay the bills so I already had the learning curve financed by my job. That being said, I find vanilla eclipse sufficient for most of my needs.