[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.