Eclipse 4.4, Luna, released | Hacker News Reader

Eclipse 4.4, Luna, released

eclipse.org

86 pointsEduard49 comments

I'm a fan of eclipse, but this release reveals an interesting thing about the organization, they aren't very effective at communication.

If this had been an intellij release, a bunch of screenshots would have been on their main page and each main feature would have had a small explanation. As I write this, one of the commenters has mentioned 'dark theme.' Forget about being on the main page, I had a hard time googling it.

Ironically, as far as I know, it was eclipse which started "New and Noteworthy" pages with each release (that's development release, not even main release). Every google link to such pages is now broken as well.

As intellij is picking up steam, eclipse is actually regressing (at least in the marketing department).

It's an open source foundation with a set of loosely distributed set of projects and teams.

The New and Noteworthy screenshots are here for Luna: https://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/news/4.4/eclipse_news_4.4.ph...

I would report a bug against the old N&N pages not being available (via Community): https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/

That is an excellent new features guide, but it really needs to be placed alongside a release announcement on the front page. Also these 2 links seem similar but are really different, a bit confusing:

https://www.eclipse.org

https://www.eclipse.org/home

A few years ago (2005-2008) they were more into communication, they made the first synchronous release (eclipse + lead subprojects). Since then they went under the radar.

Well tbh its like clockwork. This is a team that yearly releases tons of updates, when its that regular you dont really promotion. I'm always downloading first day.

The only compatibility issue I found was with stupid Perforce which hasn't been updated to the latest icu4j yet. That's amazing for the 50 or so plugins I run.

Other than that I use community plugins (Perforce mandated by employer)

They may suck at marketing, but Mike gave me a pretty in-depth briefing. Have a gander: http://www.sdtimes.com/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=71423&...

The EGit/JGit teams also shipped an update for Luna

What's new: http://wiki.eclipse.org/JGit/New_and_Noteworthy/3.4 http://wiki.eclipse.org/EGit/New_and_Noteworthy/3.4

Find the new release here: http://eclipse.org/jgit/download/ http://eclipse.org/egit/download/

JGit is also available via Maven Central: http://search.maven.org/#artifactdetails%7Corg.eclipse.jgit%...

Ian Bull's annual top 10 Eclipse features (for Luna this year):

http://eclipsesource.com/blogs/2014/06/25/top-10-eclipse-lun...

"includes 61 million lines of code" sounds scary, even if it's much more than an IDE these days.

I've spent a lot of time excising built-in, uninstallable plugins from Kepler so I definitely find myself agreeing with this.

I won't bemoan free software and when Eclipse works it's great but boy howdy could it do with a Mozilla->Phoenix/Firefox style split where a lot of the things that are integrated into the base install (are there really people using things like Mylyn?) are removed, leaving just the bare IDE.

They've done a lot of this with their "packages"; if you download e.g. "Eclipse IDE for Java Developers" then it includes a lot less than the "default" version (though admittedly Mylyn is still included).

I use Mylyn at work to link Eclipse with JIRA using the Atlassian connector. I can interact with JIRA without leaving Eclipse if I want.

The really obnoxious thing about the plugins is that they are (as you mentioned) friggin' uninstallable and cannot even be disabled (aka prevented from loading). Why? Who thought that was a good idea?

This was a big regression for me when the super-annoying Git plugin was bundled with Eclipse -- having to manually remove bundles from the installation directory is not a lot of fun nor a very robust method of plugin uninstallation. :(

EDIT: I will of course try this release, but I predict that I'll be sticking with IDEA.

Why not go with a minimal install?

Eclipse Platform and JDT runtime binaries do the trick here. Add-on must-have plugins as needed. Eclipse Standard has a whole bunch o' kitchen sink...

Where would one download those?

from the drops[1]

[1] http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops4/R-4.4-2...

OK, thanks. Will give those a try later on!

It's not even obvious from this page that this download is a "minimal" install.

That is why we have clojure or scala for. Semantic invariant code compression.

Sounds interesting, could you elaborate?

I think he means that Clojure and Scala require less code to get the same thing done since Java is very boilerplate heavy and verbose.

Love eclipse but it's definetly a Java/JEE/JVM IDE. Other projects (JDT,PDT,...) are just not that much maintained.

Netbeans while it has far less features than Eclipse in more balanced when it comes to web tech support.

So by JDT you mean something other than the Java Development Tools of Eclipse, I guess.

To me, Eclipse has been mostly stable/stagnant for many years (4.2 has actually felt like a regression from 3.x, in that the UI lots some features, like how/where to position views).

NetBeans had been lacking, but the current version seems to have improved lot for Java development (I last tried it several years ago), and it has always looked much better than Eclipse, IMHO. (Ironically, the fake-native Swing looks much nicer than Eclipse with native scrollbars+buttons, but non-native everything else like the tool-, sorry, "Coolbar" and its weird tabs (incredibly ugly, esp. the "new" ones).)

The interesting changes to Eclipse to make it more future-proof have been under the hood, I think, like a more modern plugin runtime (but I don't really know details on that one).

Sorry i mean the javascript/webtech plugin,forgot the name JSDT perhaps,need to check it. ;)

Now sure how Eclipse itself would function if they didn't support PDT.

Does anyone know why Ubuntu still ships with version 3.8 as standard, and Eclipse 4.x isn't in the repositories at all?

My searches show some rumbling about 4.x performance problems a few years ago, since resolved.

I find it easier to just download the Linux tarball instead of installing the platform and plugins from aptitude.

I did that a few times, but it was a pain. I strongly prefer using the apt repositories since things integrate well.

My understanding is that 3.8 is a backport of Juno (AKA 4.2) features on the 3.x platform.

Probably because Debian still has 3.8 (even in unstable) and they don't maintain/update the package themselves. If you want the latest packages, you might need to look elsewhere. Fedora for example already has 4.4 in rawhide and they might push it to stable in a few days.

I'm in the process of migrating to IntelliJ. The 4.x releases broke the plugins I wrote and I couldn't figure out how to get them working again. Stuff like incremental builders. Life's too short.

Too bad. I've used Eclipse since the alphas. It's muscle memory for me.

After over a decade of using Eclipse, I switched to IntelliJ about two months ago, and I'm very glad I did.

I was actually able to retain mostly the same keymap (I use a heavily customized Emacs/OS X/Eclipse keymap), so I didn't have to retrain my muscle memory much. IntelliJ's keybinding configuration is very flexible, and most of the features I like from Eclipse exist in IntelliJ, and it seems like everything has a keybinding. There was a few things that I couldn't get quite the same, but they were minor enough that I've adjusted (e.g. Emacs-style incremental search isn't quite the same -- it's just as effective, but the keystrokes/behavior for exiting out of it are different).

Importing all my plugins right now. Excited to try out dark theme, but last I checked it didn't quite look right on Win unless you modified your os chrome...

edit:nope, still doesnt look good. i guess the problem is with swt delegating as much as poss to the os, but still :(

Seconding this. I'm using plugins to have a pseudo-dark theme (a lot of the UI is standard but a lot of the editing surfaces are dark), so I was excited to give dark theme a try.

Black text on a dark background, the disclosure triangles in option panels are black against dark gray.

Have you considered installing a screen inversion program on Windows and then stripping out all the wasted space from the Eclipse UI?

That way you'll have your total dark Eclipse (not just themable parts) of the fun.

I don't grok themes, in my Eclipse there's not a pixel of wasted space (short of toggling the main menu which I haven't figured out yet). How Eclipse looks is moot when it looks like VIM ;-)

I can control the space with Jeeeyuls plugin which I use, however Windows only seems to invert the entire desktop or nothing. Do you know of an inverter that can target per executable? (basically launch only eclipse inverted)

Good question, I installed the program "NegativeScreen" on a Windows 7 VM awhile back, can't remember if the inversion spans the entire desktop or if it's per connected monitor (strongly prefer the latter).

Give it a shot, on Linux here so not sure what other options are available. If you can get per screen inversion then you're golden.

Agreed. Can't really complain when it's free software. I much prefer dark themes for IDEs, but I'll still be using the default one for Eclipse.

A cool thing about the past couple releases is that Eclipse is not a "forklift upgrade" any more. All you need to do is add

http://download.eclipse.org/releases/luna

to your "Available Software Sites" in your Install/Update preferences and then check for updates.

Thanks, I didn't realize you could do this. I've already updated via tarball but maybe will try this next time.

By the way this is documented in the FAQ: https://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_How_do_I_upgrade_Eclipse%3F

Excited about this release, and I am going to try it right away.

But I have to mention my pet peeve. The downloads are through mirrors, over http, with no checksums! What could go wrong?

So you are the reason why some downloads have checksums?

Paranoid much?

Is there a way to launch a specific run/debug configuration using hotkeys now? Someone knows?

Anyone got a screenshot of the dark theme?

edit: never mind I saw the youtube video. Looks cool.

>Looks cool.

If you say so... http://imgur.com/HAKnRwU

SWT on win :P Awesome till customization required. Who said native was a good idea again for ui? I'm starting to see why Swing can be preferable. I wonder how well JavaFX does with theming.

The Darcula theme in IntelliJ with Swing looks really good.

Yeah, just tried out the dark theme on Linux ... it's horrible!

EDIT: To be clear, running Fedora 20 GTK, it looks pretty bad, light gray on white text for package explorer.

Does it have full screen mode yet?

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