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by malkia 5860 days ago
It does, as it works for a lot of people just fine, but it's not without it's quirks.

Some things that are better in XCode: filtering of options, error bubbles, keyboard mappings.

Some things that are better in MSVC: Debugging! Maybe because I had to use MSVC for the last 10 years, and I'm so used to it. XCode is also not bad, but would need more time adjusting to the keyboard shortcuts

2 comments

Some things that are better in Eclipse: refactorings. Adding method parameters, changing their order, extracting methods, promoting or demoting classes, etc. At least when it comes to Java, Eclipse seems to have more options and a greater success rate than VS2008 with C#.

Debugging Java with Eclipse is about the same as debugging C# with VS in my experience, though it seems that VS's output console is slower than Eclipse's, and both are slower than a pure terminal.

I have to use both Eclipse and VS2k3/VS2k8/VS2k10 on a daily basis. Sure, eclipse has better refactorings. I would also argue that it's References/Declarations search features are better than the VS equivelents.

But that is the only two features where VS gets eclipsed. VS is an all-round better tool than Eclipse for everything else I need to do. Sure perhaps I can make Eclipse better by searching out some plugin written by some 3rd party, because the 3rd party support/community is better for Eclipse than VS. But from a daily use POV, atleast IMO, VS is simply leaps and bounds beyond Eclipse. VS also cost me $1000, Eclipse didn't cost me anything. So perhaps my view is skewed simply because I'm deluding myself because of my financial outlay, but I'd like to think not.

I hate Eclipse
I don't know about keyboard mappings. I'd rather press F10 to step through code rather than apple key + Shift + P or whatever it is. I'd also rather press F5 to debug than apple key + enter. I also like that tab in visual studio tabs lines if you highlight them instead of replacing them with a tab like xcode does.
Actually I kind of put it wrong - I like Visual Studio debugging keys better, as I spent most of time debugging, but for typing (and since I've moved to emacs for my linux) I prefer XCode (it's not the same but closer).

I hate XCode debugging mappings (but I haven't debug enough on it) :)