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by jmcdowell 4205 days ago
I realise this is subjective but how hard have people found converting over to Android Studio for someone used to Eclipse? I was taught to use Eclipse in university and having been using it full time at my job for the last couple of months so its workflow is quite ingrained in me.
2 comments

'A couple of months' isn't a big investment in my opinion. I used Eclipse for ~8 years, including writing plugins for it. I switched to IntelliJ about 18 months ago. I'm probably still not 100% as familiar with IntelliJ as I was with Eclipse. I'm still far more productive.
I've waited a couple of months for Eclipse just to respond to a right click.
How the hell are you codding that switching to another fairly similar IDE makes you that much more productive. Could it be that what youe are really saying is that you just like it better.

I'm having trouble getting my point across but basically what I'm saying is that most of my time is spent thinking. The coding part is small and as long as the IDE is not batshit crazy I kind be just as productive in any IDE.

I will admit that there is one IDE that I like the best but I wouldn't argue that I'm able to finish projects twice as fast with it than with any other reasonable IDE's.

And yes, XCode, Eclipse, Android Studio are more or less the same.

Sorry, should have been clearer, couple of months in my job and past 4 years at university.

Glad to hear though, I'll try it for my next android project.

If you are doing traditional app development then Android Studio is by far the superior choice. The gradle integrations make everything one liners without having to manage a ton of random plugins or master a build system. It just works.

Also, not to belittle your investment in Eclipse, but counting university is laughable and unless you're a maestro and use some random plugins that make you a 10x developer you're probably better off switching.

As others have mentioned you can change your keymap to Eclipse, or just learn new ones. Hell, I only know 4 keystrokes: autocomplete, find class by name/click, rename variable/method, and reformat code. Yet somehow I am successful -- I doubt it's my IDE. It's just effortless and I don't have to deal with stupid build crap while writing code. Granted, I don't know much about modern Eclipse, I haven't used it for two years.

If it weren't too much effort I'd be writing java in vim where I have almost 8 years experience, but I haven't gotten around to bothering because my environment is not the bottleneck to writing good code. It's probably more the crappy Android APIs and unexpected behaviors of standard libs that will unlikely be timely fixed.

It's very similar to Eclipse in terms of general layout/workflow. Shortcuts might differ a bit, but nothing major. Many of the tasks which were somewhat awkward in Eclipse like managing libraries are simpler in IntelliJ/Android Studio. Android Studio's integration with the Android SDK is significantly better than Eclipse+ADT, and the build system seems to work much more reliably for me, when it would randomly fail for me frequently in Eclipse.

I've been using Eclipse for my day job for the past 4 years and I have no issue switching between that and Android Studio.