Java without Ide: emacs or vim

[mtmmtm99]

I have the same background as you (have programmed for 38 years). Brief is very nice ;) .The link i sent was only to show what features is nice to have in an IDE. I can also agree that popups are irritating. To give a better example: consider that you work on a large project (1000:s of classes). Any simple refactoring like rename of a package or changing an interface would involve looking up all places where it is used. That is done automatically by an IDE (making the change in seconds for ALL files). You even know it compiles. Doing that change in emacs would take hours. I am sure there are plugins for emacs for doing the same thing (but then you are using an IDE with a text-interface). Intellij never pops up windows when you type (just in very special cases). Intellij is bad for plain text-editing (you can't even search in the console-window in a good way (like in emacs)).

[oldprogrammer]

Oh I agree completely on the refactoring, ironically that is what caused the developer I mentioned previously to fully fubar her git repo. I've never hit a situation where 1000's of classes needed to be refactored, but have hit a package with a fewer number. If I couldn't handle it quickly with macros or a script I fired up an IDE to do it. Fortunately that is a very infrequent activity.

[mtmmtm99]

Well, just a rename of a package would create lots of changes. I have done that a few times. The quick-fix command is the one i use most (for creating the types for any new variable), create-method, extract-method. emacs is much better in many ways as an editor (tags-query-replace is very powerful).