I would consider hiding the component palette in Lazarus if you don't want that stuff in your face and in the way. I am planning to have an option to hide the component palette in a project called Lazarus RB.

I use Lazarus RB Edition for CGI development alot, so I don't need to have the component pallette shoved in my face. I feel your pain. Sometimes, you just don't need the components in your way: not everything is a desktop GUI application. If you hide the component palette, Lazarus is a pretty good text editor! (along with a kick ass modular plug-in system in RB edition).

For the fellow who was talking about building small applications, consider KOL. You can build KOL applications visually in Delphi, and then compile them with no modifications to the source code in Lazarus (windows only, not linux right now). Obviously that's not a true solution, but I plan to build plug-ins for Lazarus RB which assist KOL development (and a whole load of other stuff, like Pascal Server Pages).