Eclipse (and intellij) are both resource hogs though.

I won't necessarily dispute this, but those "resources" on my system are there to be used.

Sometimes it seems like people buy quad-core machines and 8GB of RAM, and then are angry if an app uses more than 1% of CPU and a few MB of that RAM.

I'm not going to sit here and say that Eclipse's hour-long startup time doesn't annoy me, though...

The hour long startup time was what I had in mind, time is my most precious resource.

The RAM I couldn't care about, that's fairly cheap these days. I haven't a clue what that software does when it starts up but there has to be some way to optimize it.

Intellij is not much better.

Anything that takes more than a minute to load when my system has a load average of 35 is simply not worth using.

It's why I gave up on Eclipse a while back. (Well, that, and its tendency to crash with out-of-memory exceptions when using the syntax parser set to "full." That was the final straw.)

Personally I bounce back and forth between vim, eclipse, and textmate depending on the project (eg: shell, java, web).

Also, I'd recommend eclipse users (that are vim fans) to try out viplugin (http://www.viplugin.com/viplugin/). It is far from supporting all of vim's commands, but it has enough for me to feel comfortable.