[topek]

I don't see any reason why I would use an IDE as a glorified editor. Either I use an IDE as what it is - a heavy weight environment - or I use a text editor configured down to me needs.

It's true that Eclipse can be quite memory hungry, but if you let it eat some memory, it's features can be fast. Still, the standard configuration of Eclipse is a joke. If you are trying to edit files, Eclipse will hang all the time.

In recent days I play a lot with Vim. Even though I configured it to my needs, it still lags behind an IDE when it comes down to IDE specific features - e.g. search in a project: it's neither as comfortable nor as fast as an IDE in this area. (I'd like to be proven wrong on this feature, because that's the main thing that's bothering me) - But Vim is good in what it is: a text editor. And that's what I'm doing most of the time: editing text files.

[Nick_C]

Searching in a project: There is a builtin command vimgrep to search through external files, there is also a grep plugin that makes it easier and more versatile.

As well, there is ctags, which basically builds up a list of function calls and where they are in a file. Vim understands tag files by default and will use them automatically. You can then toggle between the function declaration and your current line (useful for searching for functions' and what their parameters are).

[topek]

If I'm not completely wrong, Eclipse's search is powered by Lucene. On small projects you won't notice a great difference, but on larger projects an indexed search is a great difference.

Does the ctags plugin work for other languages as well, e.g. python, ruby, javascript?