The stuff you lose in a simple text editor: refactoring support, integration with version control, code-complete, debugging...etc.

I'm simply going to guess based on your post that you also don't know much about the java open-source community. It is giant, diverse, and fantastic. Everything you need is out there. Before you write it yourself -- poke around on Google and no doubt you'll find something that already does what you need.

I personally hate Ant builds. I think Ant can be done right -- but every place I've seen it used it just gets hacked, and the builds are a nightmare. This is why I prefer Maven b/c it constrains the build to a standard layout and there are a gazillion plugins to do everything you need.

I've heard from coworkers that IntelliJ could handle it, but at the cost of agonizing slowness. So now I fire up eclipse (and reset all my project options and input from scratch) only when I need refactoring, and use emacs otherwise. Its not great, but at least I don't swear all day long.

That seems a pretty sensible approach in any case. Emacs is just a nicer environment to live in for day to day editing.

I would gladly move to something lightweight like the OP asked for. Most of the features in Eclipse aren't useful to people working on relatively small projects, and the features that are useful (code completion, refactoring, nice library integrations) could probably be deployed with much less overhead.

[1] Or some other rich IDE.

- Enforce code style (eg: checkstyle plugin) and source formatting rules - Project Management - Java code autocompletion (works perfectly like 99% of the time) - XML autocompletion through dtd - With some plugins you get autocompletion for jsp, etc - Hard-Core refactoring (you've got an example from another guy) - VCS integration (git, mercurial, svn, even vss, you name it) - I tend to prefer to use git or mercurial from the commandline, but eclipse has a nice merge editor and it lets me compare 2 commits very very easily. The Hg plugin even shows a tree graph with the commit tree - And lots of lots of plugins (the mylyn and jira/bugzilla/trac connectors are really nice for example)

My main argument is that it's so much easier to inspect for example a class in a jar library and see the methods it implements within eclipse/intellij/netbeans than with any other plain text editor. Eclipse even lets you see the javadoc for the class.

    8.8M    ./.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.core

I would love to have automatic refactoring tools, but they often don't do quite what I specifically need (and I don't need to do it often enough to become practiced with what the tool can do.) Last time I needed a lot of boilerplate, I wrote a quick script to do code generation for me. I very rarely need it, but it was a guilty pleasure to write the tool.

The other thing I like about Eclipse is that javac is always already loaded, so you don't have that 2-3 second start-up delay. So... I wrote a little javac server - javac is sitting there in the background, and I send it the src files and switches from a client - instant compile! I hardly use this either, but again it was fun to write.

Speaking for myself, most of my programming time isn't spent in editing, compiling, debugging or looking up docs - it's mostly spent in understanding new problems - with pen and paper. Typing is the easy part!

But my projects are unusual. It's funny, in trying out Eclipse, I'm more interested in the cool ideas they've had than in actually using it. It does have some cool stuff in it.

For Java work an IDE is essential. For C/C++ I still use Emacs but having Javadocs integrated right there and a nice debugger and refactoring is key.

You might also be interested in this: http://community.buglabs.net/kgilmer/posts/114-Getting-the-f...

Otherwise, you can leave your structure intact and unchanged.

Eclipse isn't going to "change" your code at all. It'll put two or three files and dirs in the root of your project. That's it. Your code is the same as it was before.

In fact, you can have source code somewhere outside of your "workspace" and just point Eclipse to it, there is no requirement for the code to be inside the "workspace".