The Fall of Eclipse (2016)

I actually question whether the real story is the fall of Eclipse or the rise of Intellij.<p>My impression (as someone who used both) is that Intellij IDEA was significantly better than Eclipse (to the extent that I went out of my way to be the sole developer who used it on a team of Eclipse users) but that it was not widely used. Then they decided to release the community edition which enabled people to try it without making a financial commitment. (The &quot;free trials&quot; they had before weren&#x27;t achieving this -- people knew that any time spent climbing the learning curve would be wasted if they didn&#x27;t shell out money.) Once people had a chance to see it, they chose Intellij in large numbers because it was a superior product.<p>For ME, the lesson to take away here is not that Eclipse should have had a more polished project and a more organized organization, but that Intellij was enormously successful because they released an open-source version of their product, and to wonder whether a similar opportunity applies to my own products.

I still remember when Eclipse jumped the shark. It was always a complex and somewhat bloated IDE, but once you learned how to use it, it was fast and had plenty of useful features, refactoring was a breeze, etc.<p>Then they did that major UI redesign TFA mentions. I remember thinking &quot;I can&#x27;t believe nobody cares that this is slow, nothing works and the UI is unusable. It used to work!&quot;. Then I read the Eclipse forums and found out that there was a major UI redesign <i>with no automated testing and very little manual testing</i>, and the reason was &quot;unfortunately there&#x27;s no budget for testing&quot;. This was the word of the actual official devs, by the way. They decided to do a massive rewrite without testing. It boggles the mind. I guess the lesson here is &quot;don&#x27;t redesign something if you can&#x27;t test it works&quot;, which really shouldn&#x27;t be a surprise to any software developer.<p>Then the other nail in the coffin was when refactoring in Scala was so broken as to be unusable -- yes, I&#x27;m talking about Scala IDE, the &quot;official&quot; Eclipse-based IDE for Scala. Refactoring methods was sometimes so broken it actually inserted gibberish; I don&#x27;t mean it got confused, I mean it actually inserted unparseable code, random parens and extraneous symbols. It was embarrassing. I think it got better later, but by that time I was already using IntelliJ CE.

I use both. Jetbrains is better, but it costs money. Its worth it to save the time figuring out eclipse. I use eclipse because I&#x27;m maintaining some tomcat code, and the code live in an eclipse project world. Eclipse works and once set up it does it job well. The truth is its just too complex. I still can&#x27;t get it to work with Git. Eclipse is free (since I use it professionally I donated.)<p>one example in Jetbrains I can rightclick a file or folder in the navigator and search there or inside there. Eclipse(oxygen) there is a search menu with 12 items. Most of those pull up a dialog box with 7 tabs, most of which have some sort of search option which I hope have sane defaults. Sure its more powerful, but its way more than I need 99% of the time.

Still have no idea how to use Eclipse after 10 years. Vim, Emacs, VS Studio, VS Code, a few proprietary ones - very easy to figure out.<p>Eclipse seems to be a magical combination of hard to use, slow, and hated.<p>Was there a golden period? Was it great for awhile, and now is past it&#x27;s prime, like MS Word?

I&#x27;m really grateful to the Eclipse Foundation because they changed my life giving a scholarship to a little kid in Europe that pretty much never had left his home and flying me to San Jose. Changed my life.<p>But they truly killed Eclipse. Eclipse probably never had to go beyond being what it was at the beginning, a wonderful IDE.

I started using IntelliJ in 2008 (so it was at version 8 I guess) and I liked it so much more back then. So many awesome features presented in ways that make sense.<p>With Eclipse, I was stuck by the following weird design decision: All your personal preferences such as keybindings were not saved globally but as part of your current project. What were they thinking? Who would want different keybindings for different projects, think of the muscle memory! Maybe there is a use case for having some specific keybinding for a particular project, so they could have made a way to override your global settings in such case... but not make the very first thing you do, customize it to your liking, a very weird thing different from how every other program works.

I personally like eclipse more than Intellij IDEA. I tried using IDEA for a month and even after getting used to the shortcuts I found eclipse more productive and hence faster. I did not benchmark for my usecase. The most frustrating part of Intellij was a 2 second pause whenever I tried to run unit tests even though I turned auto-compile on. Eclipse feels way more responsive to me for refactoring and running tests.<p>EDIT: Although I would like to add that I liked Intellij VIM integration more. I have been using Vrapper for Eclipse and it is decent but not many people are contributing to the project for a while which raises doubts on it&#x27;s sustainability: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vrapper.sourceforge.net&#x2F;home&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vrapper.sourceforge.net&#x2F;home&#x2F;</a>

&quot;That era is now over.&quot;<p>Not sure that is true (pedantically), as my son is building Minecraft modules in CodaKid, and they have him using Eclipse, I&#x27;m sure b&#x2F;c it&#x27;s free: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codakid.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codakid.com&#x2F;</a>. (They have great classes, FWIW&#x2F;IMO, not affiliated.)<p>I also don&#x27;t get all of the &quot;Eclipse is super-hard to use&quot; comments in the thread.<p>Look, I love LPS and think that now that we have the luxury of local cross-process wire calls and being fast enough to provide butter-smooth IDE features, that is definitely the way forward as a cleaner, less-coupled architecture.<p>But whenever I pop open Eclipse, it&#x27;s still faster, runs tests faster, debugs faster (for Java code), than VSCode does (for TS&#x2F;JS code). Perhaps its Stockholm syndrome, but as a user I really don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s that bad.<p>Where I believe it is bad, and the OP alluded to this, is on the internals&#x2F;plugin side of things; it sounds like life as an Eclipse plugin developer really, really sucks (see ScalaIDE&#x2F;etc. pain), and given that the pre-LPS architecture of every IDE was &quot;in-process plugins&quot;, that, IMO, is what really &quot;killed Eclipse&quot;&#x2F;it&#x27;s momentum.<p>Especially with open source, where people have to enjoy what their doing to contribute, and AFAIU I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve heard of anyone every enjoying Eclipse plugin development.<p>But, anyway, LPS to rescue: democratized IDE development, all from within the safety blanket of your preferred language.

I&#x27;m okay with Eclipse. Here&#x27;s why. As a consultant working at clients typically there&#x27;s enough lockdown where I end up having to use Eclipse. Because of that I haven&#x27;t had much opportunity to actually use Netbeans or IntelliJ at a client. So like someone mentioned below I just sucked it up and dealt with it.<p>It&#x27;s not perfect and I definitely get some cryptic errors but I&#x27;m actually pretty happy with it now. You should definitely add some plugins to make life easier. I like the TypeScript plugin by Palantir, SonarLint for Eclipse, DevStyle by Genuitec, and the Gradle Buildship plugin. eGit seems particularly buggy but I like it. If anybody has any alternatives I&#x27;d love to hear about it.

Back then, Eclipse was this big, bloated and slow IDE. IntelliJ was slim, fast and much more intuitive and powerful in terms of refactoring, etc. Today, IntelliJ is big, bloated and turning slow.<p>Which IDE will be the next big thing?

I don&#x27;t really find this convincing. It seems like the data comes from a survey conducted by ZeroTurnaround which isn&#x27;t really scientific evidence. I have a feeling that there is still going to be a significant market for a full featured, free Java IDE for a long time to come, though that&#x27;s also an unscientific opinion :)

I remember back in the late 90s I had bought some Borland JBuilder IDE (shrinkwrap, at software store of course), so when Eclipse came around it was awesome.<p>And don&#x27;t forget how ugly those Swing-based IDEs were because of the ugly, non-cleartype fonts in IDEs like Intellij. Eclipse used SWT which used native widgets if possible.<p>Eclipse had a plugin for just about everything, but the plugin-hell got to the point that I ended up having many installations of eclipse because the plugins for various languages, frameworks wouldn&#x27;t play nicely with each other.<p>But one thing that always drove me crazy about Eclipse that never got fixed was the intellisense&#x2F;code completion. They could never get it work without pushing some key combination instead of being able to autocomplete on the fly like Intellij, Visual Studio. So you either had to wait to get to the dot to some code completion or manually press ctrl-space which drove me crazy. I read that there was some strange architectural issues deep in the bowels of Eclipse that prevented anybody from fixing that, but who knows.<p>By the time Eclipse 4 came around I didn&#x27;t really have a need for it anymore, but remember that they were pushing that web-based IDE and didn&#x27;t think that spending limited resources for that was a very good idea.<p>But I&#x27;m happy that Eclipse was out there and thanks to all the devs that made it happen.<p>On a side note, is Netbeans much of a thing anymore? I&#x27;m guessing after the Oracle takeover, it fell to the wayside, but it was probably on the downslope even before then. That was a snappy little IDE though.

Netbeans was better&#x2F;easier to use than Eclipse for a long time in my opinion (100% accept that isn&#x27;t worth a whole lot). I vaguely remember that in about 2010&#x2F;2011 trying to use the maven and git plugins for eclipse together and hitting a lot of errors. Netbeans wasn&#x27;t perfect but it worked AND used the system installations of git&#x2F;mvn. Also, Ive never understood why Eclipse insists (at least last time I used it) on importing files&#x2F;directories into some sort of workspace decoupling the files you see in the IDE from those on the disk.<p>Switched to jetbrains IDEs now though ha

Eclipse has for years felt like someone generalized both IBM and Java&#x27;s beliefs and built an IDE.<p>That&#x27;s good for some types of coding, but bad for others.<p>... then the nail in the coffin was going down the rabbit hole with plugins. The bazaar model only works if you have enough shopkeeps. (No offense intended to the gracious maintainers of Eclipse packages, but many could do with a LOT more people helping)

Meh. I still find Eclipse to be far superior to Intellij. I gave Intellij a try last year and just didn&#x27;t find anything appealing about it.<p>OTOH, Eclipse, while different releases have been better or worse than others, and despite a rough period starting with the whole &quot;Eclipse 4&quot; thing, the Oxygen version has been very nice. I started with a RC of Oxygen and it&#x27;s worked so well I never even bothered upgrading to the actual release version.<p>The only thing that really annoys me about Eclipse is that they killed off the TPTP sub-project, and I really liked their profiler back in the day.

I stopped using eclipse because scrolling became super janky on mac after an update. Seven years on, the bug is still open: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.eclipse.org&#x2F;bugs&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=366471" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.eclipse.org&#x2F;bugs&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=366471</a>

I feel like VS Code is on it&#x27;s way to becoming the next generation of Eclipse. It&#x27;s a great platform, but now it&#x27;s practically just a plugin framework. I&#x27;m hoping the maturation of the open source world will have us not repeat the same mistakes.<p>Classic Eclipse plugins were all either created by big software vendors who wanted to create a good developer experience for their products or eager amateurs who were scratching an itch. VS Code plugins are more like good open source projects that have contributors and reviewers and frequently sponsors. Microsoft is strongly supporting it, but not with a heavy hand even if it cannibalizes some Visual Studio sales.

I wonder how much of this was due to android no longer shipping it&#x27;s SDK as an eclipse plugin, but moving to android studio

I&#x27;m using Intellij now, but used to work with Eclipse. And one thing that I miss is quickly starting tests. In Eclipse it feels like tests start without compilation and I get instant feedback. With IDEA you have to wait a second or two before it starts running the tests. I know it doesn&#x27;t feel like much, but it&#x27;s really annoying if you are doing TDD.<p>I started using IDEA because I wanted dark theme and Eclipse didn&#x27;t have it. Probably even now you can&#x27;t get nice looking dark theme in Eclipse, not sure, correct if I&#x27;m wrong.

Quite a bit of negativity around Eclipse found here, below are a few of my perspectives.<p>Eclipse is one of those tools that I&#x27;ve found to give dividends over the years, I mainly used Eclipse CDT for C&#x2F;C++ development, and then moved on to Scala and the normal Java based Eclipse. There&#x27;s also DBeaver for Database work.<p>The learning curve was steep, mainly around setting up projects so the compiles happened outside the IDE. I mainly used Eclipse to discover the code (call hierarchy was a godsend) and for finding definitions, autocomplete etc...<p>Over time though the investment has paid of, going from Java, to C&#x2F;C++ to Scala, to DB work (dbeaver) all have Eclipse underneath it and the same principles apply.<p>A few free plugins like Vrapper that give Vim emulation are also super nice.<p>A huge plus is that if&#x2F;whenever I switch jobs, I don&#x27;t need to harass anyone in the finance department over licenses. This scales up from the scrappiest of startups to the largest of red-tape laden mega-orgs.<p>Eclipse has fallen out of fashion but I doubt it&#x27;ll die, its one tool in my toolbox I can always reach for.

Totally disagree. IMHO I’ve tried both IntelliJ and Eclipse and felt IntelliJ to be really complex and non intutive. I can do tasks very quickly in Eclipse using shortcuts I’m familiar with. I also often feel the features of IntelliJ are over exaggerated and almost all the things can be done in Eclipse if you know how to use it. Once, I sat with a dev who was trying to evangelize IntelliJ in our workplace (and influence our manager to purchase licences)and explained alternatives in Eclipse for almost all the ‘awesome’ features he showed in IntelliJ. He simply didn’t know what eclipse could do. For me Eclipse starts really fast, I really like the UI better than IntelliJ. I believe Eclipse provide really awesome features for a free software and on the otherside IntelliJ doesn’t provide enough features for it’s heavy price. It seems many programmers (not all) these days feel fancy about boasting they use a paid IDE to hide their actual incompetence in programming. ( Ps: opinion only from java perspective)

In the embedded world I keep getting run over by vendors peddling Eclipse IDEs that look beautiful and support a nice dark theme that I really miss but not enough to say goodbye to IAR and a fast development environment that avoids most of the java overhead. Can&#x27;t ever seem to have a powerful enough machine to run Eclipse satisfactorily.

&gt; One only has to look at the TypeScript support in WebStorm as an example of how bad things can get.<p>I&#x27;m a bit surprised by this statement. I&#x27;ve been using TypeScript in WebStorm&#x2F;PyCharm for quite a while and have been really happy with it. Are there some big flaws I&#x27;m not noticing or specific valuable features that they&#x27;re not adding? Compared with JS and Python, TypeScript coding feels much nicer (as you&#x27;d expect when comparing typed vs untyped languages). Comparing with IntelliJ Java, TypeScript support is maybe slightly less magical in one or two areas but seems pretty much on par. I haven&#x27;t used VSCode enough to have a great comparison, but my impression is that WebStorm is a little more laggy but is more fully-featured.<p>Edit: I guess since the article was from a year and a half ago, that line may just be out of date.

&gt; Eclipse 3.x was a fast, native looking IDE<p>That is not how I recall it.

I used Eclipse and my memories are hours spent to install some plugin (sometimes as necessary as Maven or Subversion support), typing some repository address, etc. Running something with apache tomcat was a quest. Sometimes things broke and you had to clean&#x2F;redeploy it again and again until it worked. When I installed Idea and everything just worked, it was a truly superior experience. Idea is one of very few software products that I bought and continue to buy. I just really respect Jetbrains developers.<p>That said, there were few things that I liked in Eclipse. Errors were easier to work with. Also I could run uncompileable Java code and I liked it (Eclipse skipped bad code and throwed exception there).

&gt; In my teenage years, having Eclipse as a completely free top notch IDE was instrumental in me learning to program. It meant a poor student could use the exact same tools as a professional. That era is now over.<p>That does resonate strongly with me. I learned to program when Eclipse was (surely according to the graph) the most popular java IDE. It was at that point a good IDE for Java as well and I was quite happy with it.<p>But after having used IntelliJ for three years now, I really would not want to go back to Eclipse. I had to use it some months ago when I was helping a student with a project, and it does look quite bad compared to IntelliJ.

Recently i changed to Netbeans having been using Eclipse at work for years and was pleasantly surprised. Much faster than eclipse, no constant lags and freezes. At home i use IntelliJ. Never looking back to Eclipse.

When did Eclipse not suck in comparison to Intellij? I&#x27;ve been using Intellij since 3.x, and every time I looked in on Eclipse, there was simply no comparison. Intellij had a far more cohesive design -- at least for me, it worked the way I expected, whereas with Eclipse, I had to spend time hunting for what I wanted to do. Intellij has always looked better. And it has always (up to the last time I looked at Eclipse -- five years ago?) had a much better understanding of the language, and doing the right thing in context.

41% is hardly &quot;lost&quot;, its still a significant market share.<p>One nice thing about Eclipse is that its free and there a ton of plugins for almost every language out there. I use Pycharm as my primary IDE but I still have Eclipse installed in case I want to do something in Perl or Java. And to be honest there are always a couple of little features here and there that I miss.

I&#x27;ve always felt that if there was an Eclipse &#x27;lite&#x27; it would garner lots of attention and be the go-to Java IDE for lots of developers. Eclipse got waaay to big and slow and had several bugs where the solution was always &#x27;restart Eclipse&#x27;.<p>That being said, programming in Eclipse reminds me of simpler times where I would program just for fun.

I find the passion behind IDEs a bit bemusing, I&#x27;ve never really felt the strong benefits of IntelliJ over Eclipse, although using Eclipse for quite a few years means the burden of changing is reasonably high. IntelliJ certainly had very vocal advocates, the Thoughtworkers I worked with pushed it very, very hard.<p>Eclipse I find to be a mixed beast; if you get it into your &#x27;sweet spot&#x27; or ideal configuration, it can be perfect. Mine is Gradle based projects (the integration seems to work fine, or use the CLI), and keeping things simple with POJOs, a bit of Spring Boot etc for more complex things. I&#x27;ve worked with truly horrible projects&#x2F;configurations e.g. Websphere Application Developer which is&#x2F;was based on Eclipse but with everything and the kitchen sink bolted on. It was slow, buggy, took 30 minutes between firing the IDE up and being able to work etc. EJB&#x27;s, DB2 database access etc - just a nightmare.<p>So to me they&#x27;re both sort of what you make of them; I find the Eclipse plugins to meet all of my needs well, the times I&#x27;ve tried IntelliJ or paired with someone that uses it, I don&#x27;t agree with the purported benefits.

I use eclipse because it is better supported by most companies. In my company they already know about eclipse complexity and have tools to help with it. Intellij might be better, but in many places you need to be the local guru, which is fine if you want the extra responsibility.

- intellij: As a developer and linux user I dont see the point of paying for an IDE rather than putting the effort in improving an open source one. Therefore, paying for an IDE&#x2F;editor is fundamentally wrong for me.

Intellij has always been way better than Eclipse, but for a long time you had to pay a small amount for it. People looking at dollars rather than bottom line foolishly chose Eclipse.

No one talks about Netbeans! I used to love Netbeans :(

Being used to Visual Studio, every time I needed to use Eclipse I kept wondering how Java developers could tolerate such an environment. Now I know ofc some of it is due to less familiarity and exposure, but it realy felt like stepping back 15 years in time each time I launched it.

Great write up on Eclipse. I also loved the IDE back in the day. It was the closest thing to Visual Studio that was available for free.

Personally, I&#x27;ve found the opposite. IntellJ is clunky and Eclipse is easy to use. The new version, oxygen, In particular.

For PHPers and lovers of Free Software, Eclipse and PHP Developer Tools (PDT) are very fine tools. Long live Eclipse!

TL;DR: Author doesn&#x27;t like the new look of Eclipse&#x27;s rewrite and therefore, without further evidence, claims it&#x27;s dead. There&#x27;s really not more than incomplete opinion in this article.<p>There might be a real discussion here, though. E.g. as far as I know anybody who ever tried IntelliJ loved it so much that he never wanted to switch back to Eclipse. In the circle around me, 100% of people. Other people may see different outcomes. But still both Eclipse and IntelliJ where both kind of considered leaders in the Java IDE market for a long time. So it might be really interesting to discuss the strenghts and weaknesses of both.<p>Also a good discussion could be had how the path to Eclipse 4 developed and how things might&#x27;ve been done differently. That would require analysing other IDEs like the Microsoft&#x27;s as well.<p>So, you know. Quite a wasted opportunity, right here. If someone reads this and felt like upvoting, could you put into a few sentences why?

Article Header needs (2016) next to it.

that&#x27;s due to decreasing demand in java.