[TeMPOraL]

I use Emacs for almost everything, so I'm pretty aware where text editing ends and support processing starts.

That said, consider Microsoft Word. Since forever, it's been doing similar - if not greater - amount of work processing and reprocessing text every keystroke than IDEs contemporary to it. Yet somehow, it is not bloated, it does - and always did - work well on even low-tier machines. Also compare with OpenOffice, which does more-less the same things, only much slower and buggier. If M$ can keep Word functional and performant, I'm pretty sure Eclipse and IntelliJ could be made fast as well.

[chris_wot]

You were doing well, right up to the moment you stated that Word is not bloated and compared it to OpenOffice (who even uses OpenOffice? Everyone with any clue uses LibreOffice!).

P.S. as someone who has commit access to LibreOffice (and much to everyone else's chagrin, sometimes uses it), I could be a little bit biased.

[TeMPOraL]

In my experience of using Word - since mid-90s 'till today - I've never felt it's bloated. It has a lot of features, yes. I don't know what half of them do, true. Recent versions hide them in random places and made the thing a bit confusing to use. But it almost never locks up, it lets me enter text as fast as I type even in very large documents, and generally feels... slick. Not something I could say about OpenOffice when it was "the thing", not something I can say about LibreOffice (sorry). I know that M$ has a pile of hacks going on there, but hey, it works.

OTOH, all Java IDEs I've used so far lag by default. It's often about the little things - like those 1 second delays in menus, or 100ms delays between keystroke and letter appearing on screen, etc. Enough to make the experience frustrating. If I keep using them it's only because some advanced features don't have an equivalent (or easily installable equivalent) in Emacs. But it's a tradeoff between having a powerfool tool that I use every once in a while vs. enduring the constant experience of bloat.

Features of IDEs are cool, but they seriously need to optimize them. And to stop assuming that every developer gets to work on a brand-new machine. Maybe it's true in the US, but it's not true in other places (sometimes because managers don't see a problem with paying developers $lot but then being cheap on the equipment those same developers have to work on).

[lostlogin]

Your first paragraph is pretty much my definition of bloat. I've just come back to Word (work uses it) after a 10 year break. Things have got a lot worse (slower, hard to find, massive bloat, irritating layout) in that time imho.

[jwagenet]

Word 97 ran and opened faster on my old Pentium Windows 95 machine than Word 07 runs on my i5 Windows 7 machine. New features are great, but there is sluggishness and its unacceptable on modern hardware.

[Ankaios]

I don't know if this is the case for the parent post, but some people use LibreOffice while referring to it as OpenOffice.

I personally use LibreOffice quite a bit, but something about the name sounds silly to me, so I avoid speaking it. I usually refer generically to "a word processor" instead.

[TeMPOraL]

It is. After it being pointed out to me, I've recalled that I've been using LibreOffice for some time. Maybe I'm ignorant about the actual history, but I've always considered LibreOffice to be the continuation and rebranding of OpenOffice.