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Comment by ebiester | Hacker News Reader

How is eclipse in 2018? For many years, I loathed working in it, but it might have improved in the intervening years. I've paid for intellij for a long time, but I remember daily crashes and 5 minute boot times for the springsource flavor (needed to work with grails.)

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The Oxygen release works quite well for me. Sure, it could be a little faster to startup, but I don't know many IDE's I wouldn't say that about. Functionality wise though, I don't think it's ever outright crashed on me, and all the features I need are there (or have plugins).

Call me old-fashioned if you will, but I still prefer Eclipse to any other IDE. That said, I stick to "vanilla" Eclipse plus a handful of hand selected plugins. I try to avoid vendor-built versions like STS, anything branded "WebSphere", etc.

Note that if you use the latest version of Grails, you no longer really need a dedicated Grails plugin for Eclipse. Use the Groovy plugin, Gradle plugin, and the standard HTML editor and you get pretty much everything except for perfect highlighting, and code completion, in GSP files.

Plain-jane Eclipse works better for me than IDEA for my hobby Java coding. On my late 2015 Mac, Eclipse much snappier and the font-rendering is better. IDAE takes 3+ mins to launch. Eclipse takes 20s on a cold launch. To be fair I am not using any plugins and not doing any JEE stuff.

I just can't get IDEA to respond to clicks in less than 10s. There's obviously something wrong with my setup.

I have that problem in IDEA if I enable 1) IDEAvim, 2) ligatures, and 3) relative line numbers.

That may be idiosyncratic but if you happen to match, there you go. Either turn off relative line numbers (absolute are fine) or ligatures.

I'll give that a try. Thanks.

Sure thing. Going from relative to absolute took my startup time down from holy crap to a couple of seconds and eliminated a bunch of pause/stutter after code changes, especially with large files. Started right when I moved to Fira Code, and took me forever to find the footnote in a random GH issue (think in the IdeaVIM repo, but might have been the Nerd Fonts repo) that mentioned the behavior.

Lack of a great command palette was a big one. It is how I do everything in vscode.

However, after being frustrated for long enough, it motivated me to make my own that is more of modern command palette for Eclipse.

https://github.com/dakaraphi/eclipse-plugin-commander

It's great to be honest. You have to just suck it up and learn is complexities and give the thing 2g of ram, but in return you get such a comprehensive and customisable at of features - every language in one IDE, incremental compile, etc.

Using InteliJ due to Kotlin and Android made me enjoy using Eclipse again, specially on middle specs laptops.

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