[bayindirh]

Unfortunately many new developers don't believe in powerful "power" tools anymore. They like to connect many small tools for an inferior experience and they just scoff at bigger tools for being "too complicated".

I use another big tool which is around 20 years old, and that can do everything and a ton more from a single screen at the same speed or faster, with greater integration.

Yet people don't touch it because it's old, complex, looks ugly and its UI is too dense.

Oh, I forgot, it also includes a learning curve, but the same people devote their lives to "rice" their Vim installations for months.

[ptero]

That, to me, is a feature, not a bug.

Switching from a large, complex tool that includes a learning curve is expensive. You set a high bar for switching from Eclipse because you are used to it, paid a learning price and are productive in it. And you are right. But that also means that picking such a tool from a multitude of options should be done after careful consideration, which is exactly what using smaller tools provides.

On a somewhat related note, I want my professional software to only provide a (great) speedup of development. I want them to only do what I could do without them (even if it takes a week instead of a minute). This means I can often look at things that fail to work and understand what is failing. This is also helped by new engineers starting with smaller tools and building up to integrated, distributed tools only after knowing how individual elements work and can be connected. Integrating with a (good) big tool is then not a fight as it brings a "wow" moment -- "instead of doing all this by hand I can do it with a few mouseclicks!". My 2c.

[bayindirh]

[Talking from the perspective of Eclipse, because it's the only IDE I invested my time in]

In this case, it's not. Eclipse put Integrated into IDE, but doesn't subtract transparency in the process. You can see what it does, tweak every step meticulously if you want, and return to defaults with one click, if you prefer.

What this transparency brings is mental flexibility and understanding. Do I want or need to switch? I'm doing the same thing in Vim or KATE of BBEdit in 15 minutes. Maybe I stumble with a couple of shortcuts, but that's not a problem.

The funny thing is I see the compiler command every time I press build, so it's burned in my memory after a day. While I can read valgrind outputs and understand what it says, Eclipse highlights the lines automatically, so I'm faster. While I can gnuplot performance graphs, Eclipse auto-builds them so they are on my desktop after a 10 hour torture run.

In my case, Eclipse enables me to carry a whole toolbox and more in a single folder, yet all the tools it uses and what it does is so transparent that I can switch away on an instant if I don't get my installation with me, or I'm connecting to a server in a datacenter far, far away.

I don't like to be blindsided by my tools. I like blinkenligths in a way, and Eclipse gives me these blinkenlights while being highly automatic.

So while I understand your case, it doesn't apply to Eclipse, at least, because it's not a strangler, but a great enabler and HUD in my experience.

For the time investing part, I don't grind. I get a tool, and start using it, and when it becomes limiting, I start poking it and learn what feature solves that problem at hand. By that way, I learn the tool as I go, and if the tool can't expand to my needs at some point, it fades away from use gracefully. I don't do "stop, drop, roll" thing while changing tools, so I can't paint a timeline about when I picked a tool and dropped another.

[cogman10]

I think the big drawback to eclipse is it's a beast to get setup correctly before it performs well. It's built to support everything, but really does a pretty poor job out of the box.

I primarily do Java development. I started with eclipse, fell away because at the time it had pretty awful maven support. Moved over to Netbeans which has pretty good maven and java support, but went through a somewhat "unsupported" period of time and ultimately I moved over to intellij.

Intellij has been a joy to work with in Java code bases because everything just works and the smart features are actually worth it. Intellij can do pretty major refactors that both netbeans and eclipse can't think of. Further, it has really good code improvement suggestions that neither eclipse nor netbeans had. I can also simply check out any code base and tell intellij to open it and be up and running immediately.

A yellow line in intellij is almost certainly something you can right click on and hit "make better" and you'll have better and easier to understand code as a result.

All that said, you sound like you are working with a C/C++ environment. I've not done a lot with Intellijs clion so I couldn't tell you how comparable it is. It wouldn't shock me to learn eclipse is better as intellij is really well built for dynamic languages, maybe not so much for statically compiled languages.

[bayindirh]

I have never written Java projects so big that used Maven in any capacity. Instead, I'm using it with C/C++ as you guessed and Python. Also XML, JS and other supported parts of the projects I write go through Eclipse if the projects themselves are beyond a certain size.

For C/C++, Eclipse has a "so-called" indexer, which indexes the whole project, does static analysis on the fly, provides great auto-complete and warns you about gotchas. Since it can read the whole project, it has a better view than a C++ LSP, and it works reasonably fast and provides great detail.

Also, Eclipse has "Linux Tools Integration", which is also a boon for C++ development on Linux.

All in all, it helped me to build a materials simulation code without any memory leaks and with great performance insights, so I can't complain. Plus, I love build and launch profiles of that thing.

[flir]

That's not a young/old axis, it's a loose/tight coupling axis.

(Thirty years in, still using IDEs as glorified text editors, still dropping to vim on a regular basis.)

[lpapez]

In my case it is because I am wary of these tools breaking in a way which cannot be fixed, or services being suddenly revoked for external reasons.

Example: now that I'm a solopreneur I use JetBrains DataGrip, and overall I am very pleased with it. But I couldn't have it on my previous two jobs. One of the jobs restricted my work computer to only allow MySQL Workbench (arbitrary Powershell scripts also were allowed, of course), and the other one didn't want to pay for a licence, no matter how much I pleaded.

So before I had to make due with (admittedly) inferior tools because they were free and available as the lowest common denominator in the general workplace.

Being comfortable with the tools affects a large part of my productivity, and I'm more productive with a crappy-but-familiar toolbox than I am with the unknown spaceship.

[bayindirh]

All of the tools I use are free software and actively maintained and updated, plus they have very nice logging, so I can diagnose what's happening. I only needed to read the logs because I was young and experimenting with the parts I shouldn't and broke the thing on purpose. However, you can just create a copy of the installation directory to back it up completely.

Again, the tool I gave as an example has integrated configuration snapshots, and if something breaks I can revert to a config 2 seconds or 2 years before, including component versions installed at that time.

To be honest, I probably used that feature at most two times in the last 20 years.

Workplace restrictions something off-limits and I can't tell anything about. The people I gave examples are persons I know and they have no such restrictions in place.

[ernst_klim]

> Unfortunately many new developers don't believe in powerful "power" tools anymore.

I have to use IntelliJ due to Kotlin codebase, but I'm still more of a fun of Emacs and I don't like Idea that much. I think IDEs somewhat lack the power that simpler tools have, which is automation.

One thing I miss from IntelliJ is programmability. That's why I still use Emacs on workplace for anything outside of Kotlin (git, grepping, note-taking etc). I even edit code in Emacs from time to time when it's easier to write a Lisp function which will batch edit code than doing keyboard macro.

Another thing I'm missing from IntelliJ is determinism. Everything is asynchronous, so the same combinations of actions can lead to different results, making automatisation painful.

[mike_hearn]

You might find this interesting:

https://dmitrykandalov.com/liveplugin

IntelliJ is very programmable, but it can be a bit intimidating because out of the box it assumes that you want to program it by creating plugins. That's very different to the elisp REPL driven approach. LivePlugin bridges the gap by letting you control the IDE from a repl-like console, building up scriptlets that use the same plugin APIs. There are examples for how to do things like add menu items, explore the semantic PSI trees, trigger refactorings or do whatever else you want to do.

[Nullabillity]

Also, IdeaVim is just awful compared to Evil.

- Tracks the mode globally (rather than per editor), and treats mode-switching as an edit operation (so if you accidentally enter a read-only tab in insert mode then you need to switch to another tab, escape, and then go back to get your keybinds back.

- Doesn't bind escape in sidebar dialogs, so trying to exit insert mode in a terminal or commit dialog just defocuses the sidebar instead

- Still applies its other binds, so even falling back to CUA/IntelliJ keybinds doesn't work either!

- Makes no effort to integrate IntelliJ keybinds, all you get for conflicts is "would you like to lose the Vim or IntelliJ functionality that binds this key?"

The difference is stark when you compare it to something like Evil that actually values the user experience. (How's that for an irony?)

[billfruit]

There are things missing from Emacs too. Intelligent project and context aware auto-complete. Project wide search that works out of the box.

[golly_ned]

Such vim/emacs configuration aficionados are engaging in a hobby, some under the pretense that it'll make them more effective, but many simply for the fun of it.

[RockRobotRock]

I feel like I "earned" the right to use big ugly IDE after learning the underlying complexity the hard way, but that's only for one language.

Jumping into a new language with JetBrains is the difference between me spending 2 hours figuring out a codebase and submitting a PR, and me spending 2 hours fucking around trying to fix things.

[bayindirh]

An IDE generally adds another complexity layer, esp. if you’re not experienced in the language, that’s true. Maybe the reason I didn’t feel that was the gradual ramp up in using the IDE, and starting to play with a language in the terminal first.

I still don’t use an IDE for projects up to a certain size, but after a certain point, being able to also store all the nitty gritty bits about a project (building, profiles, environment, flags, etc.) in a project saves more time than it requires to set them up.

[anoother]

What's the tool?

[bayindirh]

Eclipse. Coincidentally used as the Java LSP for VSCode, in headless configuration.

[ipaddr]

Your not using rational rose to rad up your Java app?

[bayindirh]

I’m not writing Java for the last ten years or so. Instead Eclipse handles all the other things I use.

[mring33621]

Visual Age for Java

[doublepg23]

OP