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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).

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).