I have to second whirly's opinion. When you are writing some rather complex java, eclipse gives you the following: - Enforce code style (eg: checkstyle plugin)

I have to second whirly's opinion. When you are writing some rather complex java, eclipse gives you the following: - Enforce code style (eg: checkstyle plugin) and source formatting rules - Project Management - Java code autocompletion (works perfectly like 99% of the time) - XML autocompletion through dtd - With some plugins you get autocompletion for jsp, etc - Hard-Core refactoring (you've got an example from another guy) - VCS integration (git, mercurial, svn, even vss, you name it) - I tend to prefer to use git or mercurial from the commandline, but eclipse has a nice merge editor and it lets me compare 2 commits very very easily. The Hg plugin even shows a tree graph with the commit tree - And lots of lots of plugins (the mylyn and jira/bugzilla/trac connectors are really nice for example) My main argument is that it's so much easier to inspect for example a class in a jar library and see the methods it implements within eclipse/intellij/netbeans than with any other plain text editor. Eclipse even lets you see the javadoc for the class.