Kate is great for being a compiled C++ program, making it nice and lightweight. Plus lots of syntax highlighting. Not quite the same as IDEs with auto completion, but pretty good for plain text editing.

Depends, for Android app dev, once you gain experience in writing code, and use Kotlin which is way less verbose, it becomes easier. But in reality, the IDE’s autocompletion, syntax error highlights and other niceties do save a lot of time.

Yeah, IntelliJ has become worse over time. Or atleast Android Studio has. IntelliJ used to be amazing.