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Comment by wredue | Hacker News Reader

I tried eclipse again last year and, while I cannot say it has bette for worse refactoring, I don’t understand how it could possibly be better given that its detection of available symbols seems to be little more than an RNG.

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Yeah. I've been doing software engineering (mostly Java) for 20 years now. Eclipse stooped being relevant among professionals around 2008.

You'll still find eclipse or NetBeans users though, just like you'll find people browsing the web with Lynx : - )

2008 was 15 years ago and many of the people I've spoken to formed their opinion of Eclipse (and IntelliJ) at that time. But what you saw back then and now isn't anywhere near being the same software.

Can you explain why Eclipse is worse than IntelliJ today?

I think I last used eclipse about 5 years ago, when I switched to VSCode. At the time, eclipse still felt like 2008 software, extremely sluggish and clunky. In particular, it really suffered taking advantage of multiple monitors.

What's changed since then? Has it gone through some kind of massive redesign?

Intellij's vim plugin is good.

Could you please explain? You say you don't know if it's better or worse for refactoring and then you say it's detection of symbols is like a random number generator? How so?

When I used eclipse, it is suggesting symbols from locations that are not even contextually available. Given how much refactoring often relies on accurate contextual symbol detection, there’s about a 0% chance that it does better than IntelliJ.

I didn’t even get to trying eclipse features because everything else in it is so remarkably stupid, useless, and actively battling me compared to IntelliJ.

I have been working on enterprise Java projects (basic consulting) which uses eclipse almost exclusively. We do not use Smurf naming convention (SmurfDto, SmurfDao, SmurfService, SmurfController) just for being able to find related classes. We do it because eclipse seems to randomly refactor classes based on non fully qualified names. No to naming something Constants as that will (randomly) refactor the codebase to break partially if you decide later to refactor something in that class.

I have tried everything from no vendor plugins for app servers to a vanilla eclipse and it still messes up.

I do like the product, but it can be very frustrating at times.

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