Interesting, I found AIs annoyingly incapable of writing good CSS. But I understand the appeal of using it for a task that you do not like to do yourself. For me it's writing ticket descriptions which it does way better than me.
Descriptions for things was the #1 example for me where LLMs are a hindrance, so I'm surprised to hear this. If the LLM (not working at this company / having a limited context window) gets your meaning from bullet points or keywords and writes nice prose, I could just read that shorthand (your input aka prompt) and not have to bother with the wordiness. But apparently you've managed to find a use for it?
I don't see any reason why I would use an IDE as a glorified editor. Either I use an IDE as what it is - a heavy weight environment - or I use a text editor configured down to me needs.
It's true that Eclipse can be quite memory hungry, but if you let it eat some memory, it's features can be fast. Still, the standard configuration of Eclipse is a joke. If you are trying to edit files, Eclipse will hang all the time.
In recent days I play a lot with Vim. Even though I configured it to my needs, it still lags behind an IDE when it comes down to IDE specific features - e.g. search in a project: it's neither as comfortable nor as fast as an IDE in this area. (I'd like to be proven wrong on this feature, because that's the main thing that's bothering me) - But Vim is good in what it is: a text editor. And that's what I'm doing most of the time: editing text files.
Searching in a project:
There is a builtin command vimgrep to search through external files, there is also a grep plugin that makes it easier and more versatile.
As well, there is ctags, which basically builds up a list of function calls and where they are in a file. Vim understands tag files by default and will use them automatically. You can then toggle between the function declaration and your current line (useful for searching for functions' and what their parameters are).
If I'm not completely wrong, Eclipse's search is powered by Lucene. On small projects you won't notice a great difference, but on larger projects an indexed search is a great difference.
Does the ctags plugin work for other languages as well, e.g. python, ruby, javascript?
