The "workspaces" feature is at least partly broken, and there are bugs open which have been open for years, if not decades, suggesting or asking for improvements. But despite the weight of evidence that people want this improved, the Eclipse developers are generally more interested in adding the latest "gee whiz" features than dealing with "bread and butter" issues.<p>And, sadly, the UX aspect isn't even the biggest problem with Eclipse (all "IMO" of course). Performance, especially memory usage is a huge issue (especially on 64 bit systems) and the updater/plugin mechanism is too damn unreliable. If you use more than 2 or 3 plugins, it's almost inevitable that you will, at some point, try to update something and get the infamous "could not complete operation" message when adding a new plugin, or updating an existing one. Now, that's not really the problem... the problem is that eclipse just vomits a page and a half of error messages and opaque version numbers and strings at you, when this happens... instead of giving useful help on how to resolve the situation.<p>All of that said, I still use (and, in many ways <i>like</i>) Eclipse, but it is very frustrating to see these same problems drag on for years and years.
I'm an eclipse user and love it. I don't understand why so many people hate it. However, I keep hearing, from very respectable developers, that intellij is a far better IDE. Even as I type this, I have an eclipse window open for main development and an intellij window open with some test code so I can get used to it, and see what the hype is about.<p>One thing is for sure, intellij (the dark theme) looks beautiful. Makes me wonder if eclipse should still be spending (wasting?) resources developing their own GUI toolkit.
I really want to love Eclipse but I've never quite managed to. And the reason is quite simple: an IDE should enhance your productivity (otherwise we might as well just be editing files in vi / emacs). Eclipse doesn't always do that; in fact quite often it just gets in the way. It has so many silly nuances and bugs that I've now just given up on it completely (I now use LiteIDE for Go, plain text editors for C++ and the only reason I kept Eclipse on my workstation was for Android development but I'll be looking rather closely at IntelliJ for my next project).<p>It's a great pity because Eclipse -on paper- is the kind of IDE I should love. It's powerful, flexible and let's you tune it to behave the way you want it to behave. But getting it to bend to my will has on occasions in the past, taken more time than it would have taken just to bang the code out in a plain text editor and then compiling it myself via the command line.
I don't "get" Eclipse personally.<p>Say I have some code in some directory. I want to edit that code. How do I do that?<p>The whole mess with workspaces is so confusing, even resetting all settings like your shortcuts! Why would anyone want their shortcuts reset when working on something new?<p>Also, ctrl+k for find next while every normal UI program uses F3 for that (and some gnome ones settled for ctrl+g): why? Seriously: why?
Interesting and sad. IDEs are like editors, very personal things.<p>I wonder sometimes if it is an ego thing. How often is the whole direction of a particular featured changed completely because the author feels they have to be better than some other similar feature in a competitor environment? When someone says "Yeah, but even Visual Studio does X" does that send the developer into a flurry of "Oh yeah I can do X++?" or not?<p>I see similar things in the window systems, and find it sad that even in an all open source space there are such vitriolic attacks on KDE/Unity/Gnome from both inside and outside the various camps. Why is that? Its like sports franchises for nerds where there is some sort of built in comparison conflict, some need to be the "winner".<p>I completely agree that Eclipse could use a 'benevolent dictator' who not only was able to make decisions by fiat if necessary, but also was not caught up in defining their self worth by how Eclipse compared to other IDEs.
Eclipse user here.
I use it on a daily basis and there are things I really like about it:<p>- debugger (and everything about it, like hot code swapping, etc)<p>- run configurations (setting multiple run configs for one project happens!)<p>- views: I mean i use only "java" and "debug". they could be faster but i don't mind, you don't switch them often.<p>- workspaces are ok too, when it comes to organizing your projects in groups. It's ok, really.<p>What i hate:<p>- performance. for example the typical problem (i think it is a bug) when you switch between java and xml editor and you wait like 5 sec.<p>- workspaces that resets everything. wokspaces should group projects, not the user preferences. Dear eclipse, it's still the same person opening them!<p>- why the hell i have to spend 2h configuring eclipse after downloading a new version? does not svn/git/maven a default requirement for java development today?<p>- search. i never remember which tab out of 6 and what setting will allow me to just do grep in the project folder.<p>- the toolbar - please remove all this crap. I will only use those 3 run buttons and switch perspective anyway.
My gripe with Eclipse is: workspaces, perspectives, SCM plugins and the worst is Build Path.<p>Some plugins like the Maven one is something that I can't stand. It's confusing, lacks things like running a clean without needing to create a bogus "run" configuration.<p>EDIT: I forgot to say that I hate editing HTML code in Eclipse. It's slow, autocompletion is hit and miss and package explorer doesn't know how to group web content.<p>EDIT2: How could I forget about the pesky hidden directories full of stuff in it? Nightmarish!
I think it's funny that they don't seem to think of Eclipse as an IDE even though that is probably where it is most used and most valuable, esp. when you consider things like Zend Studio, Flex Builder, and Aptana Studio (which powers Appcelerator now). Yet, the Eclipse team doesn't seem to see itself as an IDE but more of a toolkit. That is completely stupid. Eclipse deserves to have its core market slowly taken away by IntelliJ. Also JetBrain's various flavors of its IDE are far superior to Eclipse.
I think it is great to see some reflection happening in the eclipse community. It's a hallmark of a vibrant open source community.<p>The next question is, what will come out of the reflection?
I tried getting into IntelliJ and, though look and feel wise and it is superior to Eclipse in every way, there is just so much lacking that I am used to in Eclipse. Maybe I am just not used to how IntelliJ does things...<p>I use IntelliJ primarily for Play Framework development. I've installed plugins for almost all other languages (node.js, python, mustache etc) and use IntelliJ for that but for non-Play Java, I tend to go back to Eclipse.<p>Some of that may be the 10 years or so now that I've spent with Eclipse.
Love that we're seeing more choices in terms of Android development. This can only be a good thing!<p>I was very frustrated the last time I tried going to IDEA and I wrote about it on my blog (<a href="http://www.fisharefriends.us/wordpress/2013/01/27/intellij-idea-from-a-long-time-eclipse-user/" rel="nofollow">http://www.fisharefriends.us/wordpress/2013/01/27/intellij-i...</a>). My observations:<p>. It seems to take a long time to “warm up” before IDEA runs as smooth as Eclipse.<p>. Eclipse is stupid about detecting when you changed a file from outside of Eclipse; IDEA is not. Eclipse is very annoying when you use Emacs/vi/OxygenXML as an additional editor.<p>. “JetBrains :: IntelliJ IDEA” is a stupid, stupid name.<p>. Emacs key bindings in Eclipse is better, alt-w and ctrl-y “just works”.<p>. Maven projects is poorly integrated into Eclipse’s concept of “projects”.<p>. I miss the native “choose file dialog” you’d get with Eclipse.<p>. I think the new version has incremental compile like Eclipse, but it doesn’t seem to work by default.<p>. The Maven daemon in IDEA used around 300MB of memory and continually consumed CPU resources.<p>. The keyboard stopped working for some reason.<p>My experience was with the community edition, perhaps I should give the professional edition a try. But at $200 and having had such a poor experience with the community edition, it is a hard sell.
The main problem I have with Eclipse and heavy IDE's in general, is their build systems rarely play well with the standard, standalone build systems such as maven or sbt, which are already necessary and sufficient with the latter even doing incremental building already. These standard build systems are a requirement because they track external dependencies and not everyone in the group can be assumed to use the same IDE anyway.<p>Sure there are plugins to "integrate" these build systems, but I've wasted too many hours futzing around with keeping the external build system in sync with their Eclipse plugins (many times having to recreate projects altogether to get past some sorts of corruption). Anybody who's had to pollute their poms with Eclipse specific config after a lot of research because of the "Plugin execution not covered by lifecycle configuration" problem will know what I mean. Don't get me started with sbt integration.
Android did not switch to IntelliJ. Google has given you the option of also using IntelliJ. Many people who do not like eclipse requested IntelliJ support and Google listened.<p>This has been brought up a couple times in the sessions, they didn't do a great job of explaining in the keynote. If you want to hear the official story, watch a recording of the Android Fireside Chat session.
I am probably a weird case: The major purposes of eclipse for me is purely CDT, and for this it does 2 things well<p>1. Graphical interface for compilation errors<p>2. Graphical interface for debugging under gdb.<p>I haven't seen anything like it (Visual Studio is nice, but only runs on MS). Would love to hear if anyone uses different IDE's for c++ devel that works cross platform.
If any Eclipse developer(s) is here, please make the following feature happen without a plugin. (it doesn't make sense)<p>Q: In Eclipse, how to reveal current file in filesystem<p><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1161240/in-eclipse-reveal-current-file-in-filesystem" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1161240/in-eclipse-reveal...</a>
JetBrains tools are the only software I happily pay to use. Their support, though not nearly perfect, is by far better than any other software I paid for.<p>I hope Google and JB can work together to do a nice job and provide a better development experience for Android.
I still remember some people joke around that the official Android coding style [1] requires "Non-public, non-static field names start with m." is because the core developers don't use IDE.<p>Anyway, Eclipse for Java development is definitely okay IMHO; but for Android development, there are always nasty bugs like this [2]<p>[1] <a href="http://source.android.com/source/code-style.html" rel="nofollow">http://source.android.com/source/code-style.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=27940" rel="nofollow">https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=27940</a>
I'm wondering how long until someone ports the Energia/Arduino IDE to work with Androids.<p>Energia is basically a port of the Arduino IDE to work with TI Launchpads, including the TI Stellaris, which has an ARM Cortex-M4F. Before Energia was ported, Eclipse was the IDE to use for TI Launchpads.<p>Working with this IDE has been pure joy. Adding libraries is as simple as copying the library into the folder and restarting the IDE. Simply by replacing Eclipse with Energia has made hacking with TI launchpad devices more fun.
Have still to try studio, but my experience with IDE is that I'm going to regret it soon down the road. They always limit or screw me in a way that I regret not starting with vim and a set of tools instead of packaging it depending on some complex/closed codebase
i'm actually sad and happy at the same time. eclim just got usable for me for android development. i don't think you can run a headless intellij.<p>but i still consider intellij the better standalone IDE.
This might sound like small potatoes, but a big gripe of mine about Eclipse is the code completion. Almost every other decent IDE (and even advanced enough editors) doesn't wait for the dot to offer you code completion.<p>I never understood why that was never offered at least as an option.