Text Editor vs IDE

So far I have cygwin, PuTTY, and just about everything else I use at work on my Win2K laptop to make it unixy as possible. I tend to work via the command line a lot and make heavy use of Ant or Maven. For quick editing I use vi, but for writing a full document or long editing sessions I favor emacs.

However, for actual development I currently use an IDE. At work it’s Borland’s JBuilder. The features I use the most are code-completion, project/file browsing, some searching and some refactoring. Every now and then I break out the debugger (which has saved me a lot of time more than once). But I don’t like to use my IDE to “manage” my projects or even build them. I prefer to use Maven or Ant or plain old scripts for things like that. And while I use CVS, I rarely use the IDE CVS support.

So when I look at it that way, it seems like I’m really using the IDE as a glorified text editor, which makes me wonder if I even want to install one of this WinXP box, or perhaps drop using one completely. JBuilder can be nice and we use the Enterprise edition with all its bells and whistles, but I don’t think it’s worth the money. I’ve used IntelliJ IDEA before and I really like it. It’s probably my favorite IDE. I keep thinking I should try Eclipse again, but, as far as I can tell, Eclipse seems to have a strangle hold on your project space with that workbench concept. I don’t like to import or export. I want to be able to open up a shell prompt and muck around in the project myself.

So I’ve thought of dropping the IDE completely and relying on a good text editor. I’ve tried the emacs JDE (Java Development Environment) before but wasn’t very keen on it. Perhaps JEdit will have all that I need? Last I used it, it was rather impressive.

Any other suggestions?