I love IntelliJ, but if you think Eclipse and NetBeans are bloated you'll almost certainly think the same of IntelliJ. Keep in mind, though, you do get a lot of

I love IntelliJ, but if you think Eclipse and NetBeans are bloated you'll almost certainly think the same of IntelliJ. Keep in mind, though, you do get a lot of features in return for all the "bloat"-- refactoring, intentions, inspections, better navigation and too many others to mention. Programming in Java is tedious and a good IDE makes things much less painful so maybe you'll want to reconsider. Unfortunately, there's not much middle ground between plain old text editors and full fledged IDE's so your options will be a little slim. You may want to check out JDEE for emacs. Setting it up is a little complicated, but it's probably going to be a little snappier than an IDE. You could also try jEdit. There are various Java development plugins so you can pick and choose the features you want. http://jdee.sourceforge.net/ http://jdee.sourceforge.net/ http://plugins.jedit.org/list.php?category=5 http://plugins.jedit.org/list.php?category=5