[miloshh]

> Then there is the beast called Eclipse. It certainly seems like it should be able to do everything in the world... Yet it is buggy, its plugin architecture is a conflicting mess, and its performance is so abysmal...

I have used Eclipse for many years with multiple languages, and none of this is quite true. There is a bit of a learning curve, where you have to learn not to do some things that break it. :) But that just takes a few hours, and a bit of patience - after that you have many months of happy coding, where it just works...

[tjr]

I used Eclipse daily for about two years, along with an internal C code plugin. I'm not sure which I can attribute to Eclipse and which I can attribute to the plugin, but my Eclipse workspaces were frequently getting randomly corrupted, global search-and-replace was not trustworthy, and for a while it was running so unstable overall that there were times I could launch Eclipse, load my workspace, and within a few minutes of just sitting there it would crash. This was running on Windows XP.

So I tried Eclipse at home on my Mac. I saw that it came with a utility for auto-packaging Java programs into OS X bundles. I made a simple Java Swing "Hello World" program and tried the bundle utility. It didn't work. I tried a few more times, and it never worked, but in fact got progressively worse in its output. Uninstall.

Some months later I thought I'd try Eclipse on the Mac again; surely it had improved. So I downloaded it again, created a new project, clicked through to add a new source code file and I got an error, that it could not create a new file.

I'm guessing that my experiences must be abnormal, since Eclipse is so hugely popular, but I now avoid it whenever I possibly can.

[jsvaughan]

Yes, your experiences are extremely abnormal. I've used Eclipse extensively (I think since 2002 or so) and apart from the very early days I have never had a corrupted workspace, I have never ever had a problem with inconsistent search results and I can't remember an occurrence of it crashing (unless you count an out of memory, which is just from bad config).

[miloshh]

Those are pretty strange. I am using it on a Mac right now, with no serious problems.

I'm not sure about the bundle creator, I never used that, but not being able to create a new file seems like some random little issue that's most likely fixable.

[drivebyacct2]

Since we're talking anecdotes, I've never ever had any of these problems. I've used SVN/Git plugins, Android's plugins, etc on every operating system that Eclipse supports and I've never ever had a problem.

[seldo]

I used it for years and finally switched away in disgust at the performance. NetBeans is very similar but much faster.

(But still terrible, in lots of ways. I've yet to meet an IDE I didn't hate)

[adbge]

If your largest Eclipse complaint is speed, check this out:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/142357/what-are-the-best-...

[ollysb]

I used eclipse to code java every day for 5 years. I used it on windows, linux and OS X. During that time I upgraded computers a few times. Each time I upgraded I was optimistic that my shiny new machine would make eclipse run at a tolerable speed. Having a language that was succinct enough to not need a beast like eclipse was one of the main reasons I originally switched to ruby. Using something simple like textmate sometimes means I have to go the long way round when I want to perform a refactor but at least I know when it's going to be slow. With eclipse you can do something as simple as open a file and have to endure 30 seconds of freeze. When you need to get something done fast that's painful not to say stressful!

[jsvaughan]

Either you have a v slow machine or you had some major configuration issues with Eclipse or other services running on that machine. Even on a 1.4GHz Core 2 machine on a large java project, source files open < 1 sec.

[beza1e1]

So you seem to be Eclipse-proficient. Please, tell me: How do i upgrade Eclipse (3.5 to 3.6) without reinstalling the whole thing and all plugins manually one by one? Why are plugins downloaded with 20KB/s, where apt-get gets 1MB/s?

[miloshh]

Is there some serious reason you need to upgrade? If so, then I think you can just unzip a fresh install and copy over the plugins you want (as .jar files) into the new directory structure. Apparently there are more ways to do this, though I didn't try: http://www.venukb.com/2006/08/20/install-eclipse-plugins-the...