Oracle IDE for Geeks

Let's be honest guys... how many times you find yourself googeling for “the best oracle IDE”? If you are like me then the answer is “too many times”... Why this? Well, partly I guess because we are not satisfied with what the market offers us in this area.
If we're going to take a look at what we have now, the most well known Oracle IDEs are:

1. Toad from Quest Software
2. PLSQL Developer offered by Allround Automations
3. SQL Developer from Oracle

If you ask me, my favorite choice would be PLSQL Developer. It has a lot of cool features on a fair price. Toad is also nice but it's expensive. As far as SQL Developer is concerned I simply can't get used with it... In other words, I don't like it: it's slow (maybe Java has something to do with this) and it uses Java Swing for its GUI, bypassing my OS look & feel. However, there are some pros which might count: it's free and it's cross-platform. In fact, if you are on a Unix based OS you don't have many choices but SQL Developer. Of course, there is/was Tora... but I would rather mention it on past tense.
So, what I don't like about these tools? Let's see:

1. They are heavy... some of them take a lot of time just to startup.
2. Most of them are not cross platform.
3. They are closed software. You don't have access to the code.
4. Limited editing features. I know they offer templates, auto-complete and stuff, but they look so small in comparison with what VIM provides.
5. They are not suitable for server environments. I mean... what if you have to connect to the database on a remote Unix server, connected via ssh within a "friendly" console? I guess sqlplus is all you have there and it's not a very pleasant experience.
6. A lot of the so useful sqlplus commands doesn't work in these environments. PLSQL Developer does a good job emulating many of these commands but I still miss AUTOTRACE, sub-totals and all the other cool features sqlplus provides.

So, taking into consideration the above limitations I decided to create (why not?) my own Oracle IDE. It may sound stupid or too ambitious, but is not (well, maybe ambitious is). The new Oracle IDE I'm working on is called VoraX and is hosted on GoogleCode. VoraX stands for Vim ORAcle eXtenstion and yes... you have right: it's a VIM plugin. If you are a big fan of the VIM editor then you have to give VoraX a try. Of course there is also dbext plugin which provides support for Oracle databases but the main problem with it is that it doesn't maintain a persistent connection to the database. In dbext, when you are going to execute something, sqlplus is launched, a new connection is done, the statement is handed over, the results are fetched into VIM and then, sqlplus is closed. This cycle is restarted on every statement execution which is quite expensive, slow and does not preserve your transactional context. Anyway, dbext is a tool designed for many databases, not just Oracle and, personally, I don't like generic database tools.