&gt; <i>Life is too short to spend my days fighting through thickets of XML tags to try to get something configured, or installing something that seems to be constructed from hundreds or thousands of files.</i><p>&gt; <i>I will say that the exception is the JetBrains IDE</i><p>As someone who wrote a few patches for Idea, I can say that its one of the most bloated and complex java applications in existence. I do not mean it in a  negative way, it just solves complex problem. And yes it uses XML for configuration.<p>Compare it with JEdit: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jedit.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jedit.org&#x2F;</a>