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Comment by jergosh | Hacker News Reader

End of the world is nigh -- Netbeans is being referred to as 'lightweight IDE.'

Indeed, if Netbeans is 'lightweight' then E texteditor or notepad++ must be hardware accelerated by a dedicated chip :D. Netbeans has to be one of the slowest and most resource consuming IDE's I ever used.

Even Eclipse is fast and responsive compared to Netbeans

My experience found the opposite to be true.

Eclipse was an impediment (in Scrum parlance) to our project

But probably a very minor one compared to the languages people use Eclispe to write.

A bit of scouring around and I found some configuration settings to speed up Netbeans's garbage collection & buffers. Made it pretty snappy on my mac. Now that's once it's loaded and I'm editing; other times can still be slow.

But it was a happy switch from Eclipse. Netbeans took longer to do things, but it didn't require that I try doing them 3-4 times before anything would happen (e.g. start/restart tomcat).

To be fair, E and notepad++ are not IDEs. IDEs are much more than syntax highlighting. And Netbeans has been working hard to improve performance. 6.9 Beta was released, and the Dev releases before that were doing better then 6.8 and earlier releases in the memory arena.

It also depends on which "flavour" of Netbeans you use. Netbeans for Ruby (i.e., without the Java stuff) is really very responsive (although I don't need/use code completion).

Compared to Eclipse, it is :-)

A fully loaded Eclipse (or one of IBM's mammoth IDEs, no idea they call them now) can take 1GB, but the bare-bones Java profile is almost snappy.

Indeed - I used my eeepc for some Eclipse Android development and it worked quite well.

Thanks for the info you guys, I didn't know this. At work I generally have 1-3 large workspaces open in the "Java Enterprise" version of Eclipse, hence my warped perspective, maybe...

Have you tried Yoxos Eclipse[1] flavor? You can build your own distribution from scratch and only include the packages you need. You can even save your choices and continue modifying them next time you login. I have a very pleasant experience using it and my builds are usually around 100-200 MB.

[1] http://ondemand.yoxos.com/geteclipse/start

Hey, that's pretty neat. Thanks for sharing!

PyDev is amazing as well. Admittedly, the machine upon which I'm running it has 16 GB of RAM, though.

PyDev is truly impressive. For small tasks I prefer Spyder from http://code.google.com/p/spyderlib/ though. It's truly light weight and easy to use for small tasks.

That's like comparing a destroyer to the USS Nimitz and calling it a small boat.

If I told my then colleagues at Engineering school I would have a multitasking, UNIX-based, RISC machine with 64 megs of RAM and 32 gigabytes of storage and a fast, full-time, connection to the internet in my back pocket I would be locked up in a loony bin. If I told them I would use it to listen to music, I would end up burned for witchcraft.

Even my humble netbook is a good couple hundred times more powerful than the my Apple II. I am quite sure it can accommodate NetBeans and Eclipse quite comfortably, apart from the screen real-estate limitations.

"I would end up burned for witchcraft." Nah, Kurzweil would have come to your rescue. ;)

very small rocks!

My netbook (900MHz, 512 meg RAM) is blindingly fast for unix; but Eclipse was unusably slow.

I find Geany pretty light and complete for my current project in php, giving me 32 lines to look at a time. Running awesome wm with yakuake has been great relief on my eee pc 1005p which has just 1GB ram. When I run an xterm, yakuake and vim, along with apache and mysql in background, it just eats 140-180MB of the precious ram.

Previously I was running gnome on Ubuntu 10.04 beta, running a browser hogged up ram like anything 780MB when there's just a browser running. I think minimal window managers like fvwm, awesome, etc really make a good case for netbooks and netbook remix, etc don't really make it easy for you to work on it. Specially when the desire is to carry a long lasting battery life device with full fledged linux on it :D

Qt creator has been awesome on the netbook - http://twitpic.com/1hxgrp I could easily complete a project working at various places - friend's house, college, college bus, nearby restaurants, etc Though I need to run Qt Designer separately in case I need to design something.

I keep trying Netbeans and Eclipse but always come back to vim + terminator + mvn/ant

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