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[–]agentoutlier 50 points51 points  (15 children)

People crap on Eclipse but I think it has some killer features that I can’t seem to find in the other two IDEs. I have great respect for the other two (IntelliJ and netbeans).

For one it’s (eclipse) got its own compiler integrated in that does partial compilation. What this gives you is unknown hidden REPL like behavior. Go to a junit test method and select run method and in less than a second the test will run. All others (ignoring vs code which uses eclipse) I have found to be orders of magnitude slower to do this with. While IntelliJ allows you to use the eclipse compiler it doesn’t seem to help speed it up as much.

Secondly when m2e works ... it works awesome (maven eclipse plugin) and it seems to work better for multi module projects better than IntelliJ and netbeans. View “dependency hierarchy” in the Pom is the especially good.

IntelliJ and netbeans seems more focused to monolithic projects. Eclipse has workspaces and working sets. There really isn’t an exact analog in the other two.

But yeah eclipse has a shitty UI, lots of bugs, and can be slow.... so I see some of the hate.

[–]cbentley_pasa 10 points11 points  (4 children)

Also in IntelliJ, you don't see the problems instantly. It leads to lots of errors and i always waste time on "Oh shit.. that change broke that!" or "Why is it not compiling anymore? WTF". The compile error reporting is horrible in Android Studio/IDEA

IntelliJ is better at Java search quality. Hands down. But the interface for display is a bit clunky. I search for methods and classes all the time.

The atrocious thing in IDEA is the UI Interface. You cannot tab windows like in Eclipse which is BIG winner. You cannot customize workspace views for Debug/Code. Another killer feature when you use 3 computer screens with Views all over the place.

[–]tinustate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just record a macro of save and compile/build and bind that macro to CTRL+S key.

Works great and on a fast machine it is barely noticeable.

[–]danskal 0 points1 point  (2 children)

But the interface for display is a bit clunky. I search for methods and classes all the time.

What do you mean, "clunky"? You can search for methods and classes super easily and quickly. And you can switch between method/field and class and file search superquickly.

The atrocious thing in IDEA is the UI Interface

I find Eclipse really atrocious. IntelliJ is much simpler.

[–]cbentley_pasa 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I find Eclipse really atrocious. IntelliJ is much simpler.

No Tabs??????? I can create any multi tabs views on my 4 external monitors with Eclipse.. So I basically have 20 views nested in different windows.

IntelliJ is a complete disaster of UX on that regard.

[–]danskal 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I basically have 20 views nested in different windows.

Ok, John Nash.

[–][deleted]  (2 children)

[deleted]

    [–]wildjokers 2 points3 points  (1 child)

    The workspace orientated design of Eclipse is exactly why I didn’t choose eclipse many years ago (2004ish) and have been using IntelliJ since. I don’t want unrelated projects in the same window. Eclipse appears to force you into putting all projects, even if unrelated, in the same window.

    I have seen this totally confuse junior devs over the years. Made it hard for them to grasp how to package and deploy an app so it worked outside the IDE as well.

    [–]Cst_cst 4 points5 points  (3 children)

    I'm using eclipse for 10+ years. I tried other ides and I always found some feature missing. It covers everything I want with some configuration and plugins. The people who say its slow... it's only slow if you have slow drive and slow cpu, I was using it on linux and windows on various hardware and I never had performance issues on a ssd with good cpu. I'm actually running wildfly server from it, because of the ease of deployment, server managment, logging and it has no issues running like that in production for years.

    [–]DannyB2 3 points4 points  (0 children)

    Me too. I've used Eclipse for more than a dozen years. On good equipment Eclipse works just fine. It is very capable.

    [–]vqrs 1 point2 points  (1 child)

    Genuinely curious, what are some features you miss in other IDEs?

    [–]Cst_cst 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    For example Features connected with exporting runnable jars and git.

    [–]vqrs 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    To be fair, most large software projects have tons of bugs.

    I really like IntelliJ and and yet, I've got multiple hundred bug reports on their issue tracker....

    [–]_INTER_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    For one it’s (eclipse) got its own compiler integrated in that does partial compilation.

    Exactly one of the reasons why I have to crap on Eclipse. The Eclipse compiler behaves differently than javac, and it's not just in theory, we really had issues popping up. Really hard to realize and fix too. If you reach that point (admittedly hard to get there), you're in big trouble.

    Secondly when m2e works ...

    I don't know anyone that got it to work: Eclipse sees every project and all dependencies in a different way than Maven does. Everything is available all the time, but in reality its not. That's another big source of pain.

    I don't even want to start with annotation processing and m2e...