[mindcrime]

Because it "just works" and no other platform has yet convinced me that it is sufficiently better to justify the investment of time and energy which would be required to switch.

Take Netbeans - I've tried it, and it's nice enough. But it never wowed me as being so much better that I could justify throwing away all the accumulated knowledge and experience of dealing with Eclipse that I've built up over the years.

IntelliJ? For years was purely a closed-source, proprietary program which completely ruled it out from the get-to. Now, they have some kinda open-source'ish "community edition" or something, but I still think of their outfit as being largely a vendor of proprietary crap, which diminishes my interest in investing time there.

And outside of Eclipse, Netbeans, and IntelliJ, what is there in the Java world?

Sure, Eclipse has its flaws, and performance has always been one, but, for my purposes anyway, it remains "good enough".

[biggerfisch]

This is the exact reason I still use eclipse too. Another point you didn't mention is that there are a lot of other products built on eclipse. For example, in high school, when I did FIRST robotics, the IDE we used for programming the microcontrollers, WindRiver, was/is built on eclipse. Knowing eclipse before I got to that stage was incredibly useful and really helped my productivity. Eclipse is also "vulnerable" to the fact that nearly everyone has at least tried it and has some idea of how to use it, which when choosing an IDE for group projects tends to swing the balance in its favor since fewer people have to learn a new environment.

[re_todd]

The "time and energy" was a big factor for me as well. One day I realized that I was spending too much time learning about code editors and hardly anything about frameworks and languages. Since most code tutorials that use an IDE are using Eclipse, I decided to focus on Eclipse as my primary IDE.