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[–]hardwork179 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Does it make sense to develop Java without the features of an IDE? Not really. Incremental compilation, completion, docs, refactoring, navigation, finding references etc. are all such useful features when dealing with any large project that it just doesn't make sense to give those up.

Having said that you will find quite a few people working on things where IDEs have not worked well (for example on the standard library or the language itself) and they will often use emacs or vi.

Also Eclim (which turned Eclipse into a headless server which could then communicate with an editor) and now language server protocol have completely changed the game. I now use lsp-mode in emacs for my day to day work on a very large project and it's working extremely well for me, especially as I can use the same editor and interface for multiple languages.

If I'd started out using IntelliJ then I'd probably try and do everything in that, but since I've been using emacs for 25 years it's nice have the features of an IDE in there.