I have been programming for about a year now.

Pretty soon I realized that I need a great Tool for writing code and learned Vim. I was happy with C and Ruby and never liked the idea of an IDE. Which was encouraged by a lot of reading about programming.[1]

However I started with (my first) Java Project. In a CS Course we were using Visual Paradigm and encouraged to let the program generate our code from a class diagram.

I did not like that Idea because:

1. Our class diagram was buggy.
2. Students more experienced in Java said they would write the code per hand.
3. I had never written any Java before and would not understand a lot of the generated code.

So I took a different approach and wrote all methods per Hand (getter and Setter included).

My Team-members have written their parts (partly generated by VP) in an IDE and I was "forced" to use it too. I realized they had generated equal amounts of code in a shorter amount of time and did not spend a lot of time setting their CLASSPATH and writing scripts for compiling that son of a b***.

Additionally we had to implement a GUI and I dont see how we could have done that in a sane matter in Vim.

So here is my Problem: I fell in love with Vim and the Unix way. But it looks like for getting this job done (on time) the IDE/Code generation approach is superior.

Do you have equal experiences? Is Java by the nature of the language just more suitable for an IDE/Code generated approach? Or am I lacking the knowledge to produce equal amounts of code "per Hand"?

[1] http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/eclipse.html