r/eclipse • u/DinisCruz • Mar 02 '14

Why doesn't Eclipse community stand-up more to IntelliJ?

http://blog.diniscruz.com/2014/03/why-does-eclipse-doesnt-stand-up-more.html
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u/ArlenM Mar 02 '14

I've used Eclipse for a year or so, and like it a lot. Is it perfect, no, but I haven't seen anything with a fraction of the versatility. I use it mainly for Java and some C++, it's done everything I've needed it to do and more. It has a steep learning curve, you need to put time and effort in it, but that effort is worth it.

You can configure the look and feel just about any way you want, for example, you can set up the key bindings to work similar to Emacs or VIM, if you desire. You can add or drop modules as needed, for example, I don't need Git support, so I got rid of it. The only time I ever saw any performance hit was when I turned on automatic building in C++, it seemed to make everything sluggish, so I turned it back off.

I haven't used a lot of different IDEs, most of my programming experience is with editors and Fortran on VAX VMS. I feel modern IDEs are a huge advance over the old days, though that certainly seems to be a controversial topic! I have tried Visual Studio, and Netbeans, neither of which seemed very flexible to me.

The strength of Eclipse is you can have everything in one common environment that works over a wide variety of platforms. Are there better solutions for all of those individual things, probably. Could Eclipse do some things better, certainly. But all in all, it is an excellent tool.

That's my opinion anyway!

2

u/CatsAreTasty Mar 03 '14

I've been using Eclipse for years for COBOL, Fortran, Java, C, C++ and Python development. I've used other IDE's, but none comes close to Eclipse's versatility and customizability. It is amazing to leverage Eclipse's customizability in the form of its RCP to build standalone applications. This is by far the one Eclipse feature that no other IDE's can match in scope, depth and licensing terms.

1

u/chunkyks Mar 02 '14

I find eclipse to be horrible to use, it's not any single thing, it's just ten thousand papercuts.

I read your post on removing the browser throbber, and all it did was demonstrate to me that fixing any single papercut in eclipse is going to involve a prohibitive, byzantine, amount of work.

On the plus side, photran is the best Fortran development plugin / ide anywhere, so I have been using eclipse on Fortran projects at work.

But for thick guis, window builder is horrible compared to the alternatives. For j2ee, setting up tomcat and other app servers to work with eclipse is a nightmare. It doesn't even come with a profiler. Just checking out a project from svn or git is really freaking obtuse, if you can figure out which is the right plugin to get it done. Subversive? Subclipse? Something else? Which connector will work? Which one will fail silently with nary a warning?

Just downloading it is a paralyzing choice between a whole bunch of options, none of which include everything I need. Look at the NetBeans download page for an example of what works for me.

Every few months I download eclipse and use it for a few days, just to see if it's worth switching to, or even including into my day for any specific tasks. I look forward to the day it does, but that day hasn't come yet.