> Assuming your system can handle the what, 1G+ IDE, and do so with > reasonable speed.... As we speak, I have under the eyes two Eclipse workspaces with tens of OSGi (Java) projects and hundreds of dependencies. Workspace 1: 167M of 274M Workspace 2: 99M of 322M (show heap status in Preferences > General) I have just shown a colleague how to use 'Open Type Hierarchy' (F4) to browse through the inheritance hierarchy of any objects across all classes of the workspace (your own + those of all libraries). When your whole stack is FLOSS software, and you can thus directly open the code of each third party class and continue browsing, I think that an IDE as a real value. I routinely have around 4 workspaces open on my 4 GB workstation (+plenty of firefoxes, and the test servers and processes, etc.). Sorry for the (slight) OT, since I'm talking about Java devpt, but I want to share that I am really happy with Eclipse (v3.5.2 x86_64 PDE) on CentOS. In terms of stability and resource usage it is the best fit I have found so far for Java devpt, contrary to what many would think...