I just installed Eclipse, and in the workspace directory, it created a ".metadata" directory, containing 9.2M. Most of it is here (output from du -h): 8.8M

I just installed Eclipse, and in the workspace directory, it created a ".metadata" directory, containing 9.2M. Most of it is here (output from du -h): 8.8M ./.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.core Unfortunately, finger memory takes a lot longer to retrain than 15 minutes of learning the basic basics - it's more similar to retraining from guitar to piano. But truly, it's just a matter of time. I would love to have automatic refactoring tools, but they often don't do quite what I specifically need (and I don't need to do it often enough to become practiced with what the tool can do.) Last time I needed a lot of boilerplate, I wrote a quick script to do code generation for me. I very rarely need it, but it was a guilty pleasure to write the tool. The other thing I like about Eclipse is that javac is always already loaded, so you don't have that 2-3 second start-up delay. So... I wrote a little javac server - javac is sitting there in the background, and I send it the src files and switches from a client - instant compile! I hardly use this either, but again it was fun to write. Speaking for myself, most of my programming time isn't spent in editing, compiling, debugging or looking up docs - it's mostly spent in understanding new problems - with pen and paper. Typing is the easy part! But my projects are unusual. It's funny, in trying out Eclipse, I'm more interested in the cool ideas they've had than in actually using it. It does have some cool stuff in it.