Jrockaway works at Google, where their Java workspaces are roughly equal in total LOC to all Ruby in production everywhere.
(That's generally how I feel about Eclipse. It will spend several hours analyzing your source code so it can do a perfect variable rename. But you can get 99.99% of the way there with "perl -pi -ne 's/int foo/int bar/g'" and fix the two cases it broke in seconds. I'd rather not write that and not do the fixup, but with so much cognitive load to make that automatic, it just isn't worth it. Why does refactoring Java require a complicated GUI application with more settings than the Space Shuttle?)
The one feature I really want is something that detects what problem I'm trying to solve and shows me the documentation for libraries that can help.
But really, I wish someone would write an article like "why I switched from vim to Eclipse", but I only ever see ones where the author does the opposite.
You haven't looked very hard, most Eclipse users today came from emacs or vi. And are you seriously arguing that a search/replace is more effective than a refactoring performed automatically with guaranteed correctness?
You are being unreasonably and inexplicable biased against Eclipse (and IDE's in general), it's pretty baffling.
Similarly, a cursory google search of 'switched "from vim to eclipse"' doesn't reveal any articles of this form.
If you can point me to such an article, or write one, I'd be interested, but I think you have to agree that articles of the form IDE->vim/emacs are much more common than the reverse.
Proportional font support for code and javadoc, to make better use of screen pixels.
Javadoc on mouse over
When debugging step by step, variable inspection on mouseover at source code point.
Most popular plugin features are well packaged for no hassle installation.
These are few of my favorite things that I can't do in emacs/vim...