Hacker News Reader

Comment by paperwork | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

View on HN

New users acquire a very bad impression of Eclipse because it is very badly behaved in terms of GUI conventions: It offers to do things that make no sense. For example, if I have an Android project selected, four out of the siz "Run as..." actions it offers make no sense. Run my Android app as a Java applet? How? Why? Doesn't it know an Android app can't do that?

This could be very hard to fix. Does Eclipse have all the interfaces defined for correct behavior in all cases? how long would it take all the plugin developers to code the implementations for "Is this action sensible on this object?" and have that happen every time the selection changes?

The keyboard shortcuts make no sense on OS X, either. Most of them are very Windows centric. Eg pressing anything on the F row or that uses Ctrl is not very native. I feel like Eclipse on OSX is an afterthought

My main problems with eclipse:

1. Startup time. I just ran it twice on my machine. First time it took 20seconds before showing the splash, then 10 seconds after that (I'd never launched it before). Second time it took over 5 seconds to launch completely

2. Cluttered UI. menu bar + status bar + project explorer + tasks + outline take up between 20 and 70% of the window depending on how big I have the window (god help me if i try to use it on my old laptop with its 1300x700 resolution)

3. Difficulty of editing stand alone files. It's just a pain in the arse editing files that aren't in the project, and that you don't want to be in the project

For comparison, sublime text 2 launches in <1second on the same machine, and that includes restoring 100% of the previous working state, including unsaved changes to all files, even if the computer crashed and it wasn't closed down properly.

edit: I almost forgot

4. It also takes 1-5seconds to close.

If you've used both, wouldn't you consider Eclipse and sublime text to be two very different tools? If you want to quickly edit some text, then Eclipse is overkil. If you are going to write programs for 8 hours a day, then Eclipse's benefits far out weigh its problems.

To me, it is the difference between a car and a bike. The two serve different purposes.

I don't mean to downplay problems with Eclipse. I remember that it was confusing when I first started using it. In the intervening years, I think the problem with eclipse is one of missed opportunities (or misplaced priorities).

This is a boat i bought into only in college. Once my professional career started, and i started viewing coding as an artisan craft, i realized that less tends to be more. I want an editor that i never have to wait for. Every IDE i have tried has time where i pause waiting for it to try and do something.

Give me column editing, multiple cursors, and snippets and i will show you an editor i can code a system of any real size with.

"column editing, multiple cursors, and snippets"

It's more about smart refactoring, code completion, extensibility, project management, "open type hierarchy", "show usages", etc. You kind of need these things in big projects. Especially enterprise Java ones.

"Of any real size" - I dispute you've written one that counts.

Size in terms of software (and data) is always a perspective thing to be sure. I have worked on 2 separate millions of LoC codebases. Maybe its my ignorance, but i think there is more difference between a 10k Loc vs a 2mm Loc than 2mm vs 20mm.

I might be wrong, I've never worked in something an order of magnitude larger than a few million.

What do you work on? I find there's a huge difference between languages and projects. I don't mind writing Haskell or Python in emacs, but I couldn't live without VS for our fairly large C++ project.

Debugging without the IDE is a huge pain. Finding what functions call a given function, when many functions have the same name (so forget grep), is also something we use very very often to check what impact a change would have. That and "go to definition".

Well, I do develop C++ with Emacs, and I don't miss VS a single day. And you can 'Go to definition', 'find callers', etc, with other editors (Emacs, Sublime, SourceInsight, etc) ...

You're thinking in a text fashion and not an IDE. You don't need "multiple cursors" in Eclipse because you can right click the item Refactor name, and every instance across your entire project is correctly updated instantly. That works for variables in scope, or methods in a class, or class name references. This would be like multiple cursors on steroids if such a thing ever existed, but it wont since people use text editors mostly on languages that don't feature static typing so you can't do that kind of ultimate magic.

Also you don't need snippets because it has (wait for it) templates! Sample thing, user definable complete with variables to interpolate just like Sublime Text. Been there before ST existed as a product.

I think there is an Eclipse IDE education problem at work here. Discoverability seems to be really low.

If I had to use Eclipse 8 hours a day, I'd commit suicide out of desperation.

Then there must be something wrong with me. I used Eclipse all day every day for the last year for an android project and several websites and I am fine. Sure there were a few problems with updating, android and couple of other things but I solved the problems, adapted and marched on.

On the other hand, I am excited to try this new Android Studio IntelliJ thing, simply because of the hype and people's recommendation that IntelliJ is heaven. If it improves my productivity, then great. If not, I am fine with Eclipse and it looks like they got their wake up call to better their product.

If start-up time is an issue for you then you aren't using eclipse as an IDE. Eclipse and now IntelliJ is my primary development environment. IntelliJ is basically running on my machine all the time. IntelliJ may have an advantage of eclipse here in that it can have multiple workspaces open - I don't know if eclipse can do that.

I use SlickEdit for C++ and it starts much faster, but while it can "do" java, its completely ineffective compared to IntelliJ or even eclipse. OTOH IntelliJ occasionally hugs all 8 cpu threads trying to grok spring bean usage across three maven projects. Its a price I'm willing to pay.

And finally theres TextMate and Joe or on these knackered solaris boxes, vim. Can't really beat vim for start-up time, but unlike some of my genius friends, I can't get my head around it for large projects.

My point is, if your use case is open editor, open file, edit file, close file, close editor, then you don't want an IDE, and there are plenty of great editors for your use case.

Startup time is relevant to a program that crashes (or gets into an inconsistent state requiring restart) as often as Eclipse.

This is surprising because I've been using Eclipse every work day for over 10 years and it never gets in an inconsistent state and crashes are even rarer. Perhaps you are using bad plugins...although I've installed plenty of crap plugins and I still don't have that problem.

Very cluttered UI, but then again many other IDEs come close, no? Still quite bad though...

I don't think startup time or even close-time are particularly important. If you're using an IDE, you shouldn't expect to open it up and close it time and time again in one session, unless...

I think the main pain in the ass you missed about Eclipse is that it crashes a lot. I actually quite liked Eclipse until my project got a tiny bit bigger, and it kept on crashing every few hours. Worse yet, its backups are really bad. You'd think it had some auto-backup facility set on default, but there isn't one that works well enough.

It would be a more equal comparison to compare Textpad to Sublime Text. Compare Intellij startup to Eclipse startup.

Sublime Text is great, I love it, but its a text editor. If I wasn't a lazy guy I would keep using vim/emacs, but I like mice so I use Sublime Text.

When Sublime Text adds drag and drop refactoring, in app debugging, and the millions of other features required from an "integrated development environment" then startup time would be a more equal comparison.

IDEA is similar to Eclipse in those respects, except perhaps editing stand-alone files.

because of those default toolbars and windows, i think eclipse download package should come with a +30 inch screen.

but comparing eclipse with sublime text is like comparing word to the notepad. a bit unfair.

> I don't understand why so many people hate it.

On a fresh computer, download and install Netbeans 7.3 and Eclipse 4.2. Then check out a Mavenized JSF project from and run it.

Netbeans does Maven and Subversion out of the box, so I don't have to install any plugins. I point it at Tomcat, and it will build and deploy the app for me with one click of a button and zero configuration.

I have never successfully gotten all the plugins and everything necessary to do this with Eclipse working. The member of our team that uses Eclipse deploys wars manually for this reason.

IntelliJ, for what it's worth, also seems to do all of this out of the box (I used it for about a day, and concluded it wasn't enough better than Netbeans).

The easiest way for me to describe Eclipse's problem and why I don't like it is to simply say it is worse. It's fat, slow to start up, slow to use, requires hours of complicated setup to get it to do what you want. Netbeans utterly wrecks it for every use case I have. Outside Java, I use Emacs mostly. I would actually love to get Eclipse working so I can use eclim, but the configuration story is just so horrible. Installing plugins is slow. Choose an update site? Wait five minutes for the UI to respond while it downloads a sitemap? Which of these five plugins is the Subversion plugin I need? What's Mylyn, and do I need integration with it or not? And so forth.

That's just Textmate blah blah making its way into the mainstream.

Can you explain the Intellij draw to me? I've spent the last two days off and on look at the community edition via installion and googling and I don't see the killer feature set that everyone is talking about. It looks like a JEdits older brother to me.

I don't like Eclipse because it doesn't do the stuff that a basic IDE is suppose to do either at all or very well. Perhaps you have noticed that when you type in Intellij, it actually makes good suggestions and auto completes properly.

I've tried to like Eclipse a few times over the years. What kills it for me is (paraphrasing a bug report ISTR)

"We don't support rectangular selection and probably never will."

That's not true. Alt-Cmd+A toggles block selection on macs. Not sure what the keybinding is on windows.

Sounds like they added the feature then. Does paste of a block selection work correctly too?

It does, yes.

A general tip to find features like this: Press Ctrl+3 (Cmd+3 on Mac OS X) or type in the "quick access" search bar in newer Eclipse versions. It shows the command and the shortcut. Also useful for toggling "Show Whitespace Characters" without needing to have the button in the toolbar, jumping to a preference page, etc.

The number one reason I don't like it is performance. Things like typing and switching tabs shouldn't be slow. So I'm stuck choosing between having a bad experience or spending time in forums learning the latest .ini file tweaks and/or what features to disable to get normal editor performance. (This on a recent MBP.)

Not sure how IntelliJ compares in this regard.

I don't know if I would quite go with loving Eclipse (working in an environment where workspaces are practically required instead of only closing/opening projects and having to redefine settings constantly is a pain) at this point, having never really used IntelliJ either, but...

I will say as someone working with SWT right now that I'm not a fan.

Not sure what I use at home (commenting from work) but I have a dark theme running on my eclipse with great success. Its worth a google for the plugin and themes developed by users.

I did install some sort of theme manager for eclipse. It changed the color of the editor, but not rest of eclipse. When I maximised the editor window, it did look nice and felt easier on my eyes. However, when other windows and widgets were visible, that dark editor just looked out of place :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com