Holy Moly, is Eclipse the worst IDE ever?

[dave_the_nerd]

Wow, just decided to dive into Android development today and am beyond baffled by how horrible of an IDE Eclipse is. I typically do a lot of embedded stuff, so I use MPLAB or Keil frequently, and then MS Visual Studio C# for high level stuff. I have been really impressed with Visual Studio, not sure how it scales on huge projects, but for quick and dirty, it is pretty amazing.

But then I dove into this nightmare. It took a while to get all the dependencies straight to even get into Eclipse. Now that I am in it, it is so sluggish (maybe just the Android SDK), and there are tons of bugs with the GUI, like copy/paste not working. I am baffled by how bad it is. Has everyone else had this experience? I am working in Win 7 on a decent machine, maybe it is better on Linux? Either way, I am really impressed the the sheer suck-factor.

Eclipse has its supporters.

Anyway, the simple fact that you asked the question means I know you didn't learn C++ in the '90s using Borland.

 

[funks]

I'm also using Android Studio which works pretty well too. But still feel eclipse has better UI responsiveness for being native.

Considering Google deprecated Android development tooling on Eclipse ( and pushed Android Studio ), not really much of a choice which tool to use for Android Development

Both are still much better than visual studio in my use cases. I honestly believe there are more people using Android Studio now than Visual Studio ( yep, different audience's )

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[brianmanahan]

that is your problem - you've never been exposed to anything else. now you will just think the "eclipse way" and any tool you use will feel out of place.

RIP

i'll use intellij as long as i bind the keys to eclipse shortcuts

either that, or gvim

 

[dysonlu]

I have a software engineering degree. I worked with Java and Eclipse around 10 years ago. Back then, Eclipse was pretty bad; slow, bloated and ugly come to mind. I work in tech but I have not been doing much programming in the last few years. A few months ago, I decided to get back to doing some programming and chose to learn web app development. Learning Javascript, Node.js, MongoDB, jQuery, gulp, npm and many other tools and tech of the ecosystem has been A JOY so far. This week, I've been following an online course. The course is taught by Marty Hall, a Java veteran, from what I can tell. In his course, we needed to run a web app server and deploy some simple app. He choose to use Apache Tomcat and Eclipse for that! Apache Tomcat? Piece of cake I told myself. Download, unzip, copy some files over and start the server. But I decided to follow along with the steps in the course videos that make use of Eclipse for this. That usually simple walk in the park become a tedious nightmare. "Thanks" to POS Eclipse. Run Eclipse, add a server, point it to installed Tomcat, run server. It's running. Go to page localhost:8080. Ooops 404! What?! Alright, lets forget this. Lets try to add a new project and deploy it instead. Maybe we'll have better luck. So new Dynamic Web Project, choose a name, select default config and then add an simple index.html page. Now, right-click the server, choose "Add and Remove", choose the newly created project and add. Stop server, start server. It's running. No error. Let's load that page. 404! WTF!!! Googling about this gives me plenty of hits dating back to 2011 and even 2009. Stackoverflow gives plenty of suggestions. Do this, do that. There are multiple recipes but I did not find any answer to "why". Why the error? Why I need to do this or that to fix this? There's maybe a valid logical reason why I'm having this issue. But you know what? This is easy stuff that shouldn't cause problems in the first place. I might as well manually copy my project over to Tomcat and start it manually. I don't need to wrestle a crappy bloated tool to do simple stuff. So after so many years, Eclipse is STILL CRAP! I gave it another chance but it's still a terrible experience. I'll stay far far away from this turd if I have a choice.

I needed this rant. Thank god for this thread.

 

[cytg111]

Hehe .. welcome to the open sore that is Eclipse.
I did that, copying directly to tomcat with a script + there is config option i tomcat that will it auto reload when you touch any file in the webapp. IIRC i ended up with my target folder in the webapp dir, thus running exploded and auto-reload ... much faster than getting 3-4 half baked plugins to do the same.

 

[Maximilian]

Ive come to the realization that Eclipse is 100% a POS. Its usable, but its a POS. I couldn't get the typescript compiler to ignore the node_modules folder, cant be done in tsconfig because the eclipse plugin ignores it and insists on using the GUI it provides with no ignore option. Also it dosent spot the revealing module pattern in JavaScript. Also yeah everything about tomcat and configuring that. Also having to kill the thing with task manager a few times that was related to the typescript compiler tbh.

Netbeans at least works out of the box. The plugin support is pretty poor though and I just realized today it dosent support ES6 yet. Ive got atom text editor open in another window to do that in and I copy/paste it over to netbeans. Thats a bit crap but whatever. Atom is really cool.

I see a common theme on reddit actually. People doing modern web stuff are either using a text editor or some kind of Jetbrains IDE, webstorm, intelliJ etc. After giving intelliJ free trial a shot I can see why. I think for my next project im gonna give them £120 for their IDE just to save me from having to ever deal with eclipse again. Typescript support built in, JSX support built in, decent GUI, every error it kicks out it gives a possible plain english explanation and a little link saying "fix me" taking you to where you can fix it. E.g the IDE cant find JRE_HOME so "fix me" takes you to the part of the IDE where you can configure that. Tomcat just worked. Importing a maven project just worked. Intellij is the photoshop of IDE's. Eclipse is the GIMP.

EDIT: Just realized ive bitched about Eclipse before in the same thread

 

[cytg111]

Speaking of Eclipse and thus by natural extention Intellij .. Have any of you guys had a chance to check out CLion? I Havent yet..

 

[Gryz]

I work in a department where we develop a product where the software is written in C (and a little bit of C++). I'm new. In a previous job I always used Emacs (with gnu-id-utils to find tags). In my new company, it seems half the programmers use Eclipse to do their programming. And they all seem very enthousiastic about Eclipse.

I've been hesitant to switch from Emacs to Eclipse. Because the keybindings of Emacs are burned into my fingers and brain. The gnu-id-utils allow me to find quickly where functions and variables are defined, and where they are used. That has always been enough for me. But Eclipse can show you so much more. E.g. oursoftware is hardly documented. Reading the code is supposed to be the best documentation. With Eclipse my collegues zip through call-stacks and other locations like it's nothing. It takes me a lot longer to figure out what is going on. So I suspect I might switch to Eclipse in a few months.

I'm surprised to hear these negative comments about Eclipse. Is it maybe depending on the language in which you program ? Maybe Eclipse has good support for C and some other old languages. But not for newer, or less popular languages ?

 

[funks]

Eclipse works well for us, Java Development, source repository handling is great, refactoring support works well, debugging support works well too.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[dysonlu]

Ive come to the realization that Eclipse is 100% a POS. Its usable, but its a POS. I couldn't get the typescript compiler to ignore the node_modules folder, cant be done in tsconfig because the eclipse plugin ignores it and insists on using the GUI it provides with no ignore option. Also it dosent spot the revealing module pattern in JavaScript. Also yeah everything about tomcat and configuring that. Also having to kill the thing with task manager a few times that was related to the typescript compiler tbh.

Netbeans at least works out of the box. The plugin support is pretty poor though and I just realized today it dosent support ES6 yet. Ive got atom text editor open in another window to do that in and I copy/paste it over to netbeans. Thats a bit crap but whatever. Atom is really cool.

I see a common theme on reddit actually. People doing modern web stuff are either using a text editor or some kind of Jetbrains IDE, webstorm, intelliJ etc. After giving intelliJ free trial a shot I can see why. I think for my next project im gonna give them £120 for their IDE just to save me from having to ever deal with eclipse again. Typescript support built in, JSX support built in, decent GUI, every error it kicks out it gives a possible plain english explanation and a little link saying "fix me" taking you to where you can fix it. E.g the IDE cant find JRE_HOME so "fix me" takes you to the part of the IDE where you can configure that. Tomcat just worked. Importing a maven project just worked. Intellij is the photoshop of IDE's. Eclipse is the GIMP.

EDIT: Just realized ive bitched about Eclipse before in the same thread

Yeah, JetBrains Webstorm looks really AMAZING for web development. I've seen it in action in a course, used by the instructor. The integrated debugger is awesome, the intelligent suggestions/auto-complete is also top-notch. If I ever decide to go full IDE for web dev, Webstorm would definitely be my first choice. Google last year decided to abandon Eclipse for IntelliJ IDEA for their Android IDE. That's pretty telling of how good Jetbrains IDE is and how crappy Eclipse is.

Currently, I'm using Sublime Text.

I'm surprised to hear these negative comments about Eclipse. Is it maybe depending on the language in which you program ? Maybe Eclipse has good support for C and some other old languages. But not for newer, or less popular languages ?

Right. It's likely depending on what you do. Plain Java/C/C++ dev probably works great with Eclipse. It has 15 years to make that right after all. I'm sure when you have all the hurdles figured out, that ugly IDE probably works half-decent. But to me, life is too short for having to wrestle with this monster and tame it. (Even the installation itself wasn't straightforward enough to my liking. Yes, I gave their installer a shot and it was a mistake.) I'll go with the easier/simpler/faster way of doing what I need to do for now...

The problem is Java developers tend to be these enterprise architects who try to over-engineer everything. They'll write a Hello World app with a hierarchy of classes, AOP layer, persistance layer, test suite, etc. It's such a scam and has gotten way out of hand recently and given Java a bad name.

I see a trend of lighter, more flexible frameworks and languages that run on the JVM. Java's become this century's COBOL.

I realize the comment above was made a long time ago but that's pretty much my impression as well. Eclipse really has this "bloated rigid over-engineered patched enterprise solution" feel that I'm quite familiar with (I've worked in enterprise IT for more than 15 years and started in IT pretty much the same time Java did). The reason I like the web dev ecosystem so much is that it is more distant from this enterprise feel, which I'm sick of. The web dev scene is faster, more nimble, more creative, more dynamic and offers more choices. Many of the tools are terminal/script-based that offers flexibility, not getting in the way of your work. You make the tools behave the way you want, tailored to your work flow, as opposed to you changing your work flow according to how the tool works.

 

[postmortemIA]

I have no problem using the best out of Eclipse. Sure it is messy and bloated and poor in some aspects. But it does try to be swiss army knife of IDEs, and mostly succeeds. Netbeans is similar, just bit more polished.

 

[cytg111]

I realize the comment above was made a long time ago but that's pretty much my impression as well. Eclipse really has this "bloated rigid over-engineered patched enterprise solution" feel that I'm quite familiar with (I've worked in enterprise IT for more than 15 years and started in IT pretty much the same time Java did).

- 100% in agreement, same background, same experience. I will say that, given its flaws, I still use it for C/C++ dev on linux (not prof, only 'homework').. havent found anything better there (still waiting for a community edition of CLion..)

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Okay, so I actually have to use Eclipse now.

1) 1440x900 is not big enough.
2) The UI is unintuitive, but once you learn where things are, it works.
3) I actually hate the spellcheck more than anything else at this point.

 

[purbeast0]

Why do you "have" to use Eclipse?

 

[smackababy]

Why do you "have" to use Eclipse?

Some companies force it. Other times, some companies have licenses for things that only work on Eclipse. For awhile, Websphere would only run locally on Eclipse I believe, unless you purchased a $10,000 license.


I've been using Microsoft's Visual Studio Code as an alternative to Sublime lately, and it fantastic. I love it. But, I do mostly video player development these days.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Why do you "have" to use Eclipse?

...

Because I'm taking a Java programming class and Eclipse was free and works.

And because I'm too stupid for Netbeans, apparently.

 

[William Gaatjes]

I tried eclipse once. When it is fully configured, i am sure it is easy to use. But when you have to setup everything for eclipse yourself, eclipse becomes a project of its own.
That is why years ago when i wanted to do some embedded programming i went to programmers notepad 2. Very easy to setup and it got me to do what i wanted.

I like visual studio. I learned to program (Hobby related, although i can put what i learned sometimes to use to help find issues at work even though i am not doing the software.) under CVI from national instruments, went to borland C because i did not want to be stuck to the dll from CVI. Got frustrated from Borland C and from there on went to visual studio 2008.
I never looked back.

 

[Kapav]

2) The UI is unintuitive, but once you learn where things are, it works.

I think that pretty much sums up Eclipse. Do I really "enjoy" the experience? No, but it works for me for any java thing I need to do.

 

[cytg111]

Yea you can wrap yourself around a specific version and its quirks.. just like you could the psycho girlfriend. Doesnt mean its a good idea.
I have had the pleasure of working with a few different versions of the cdt version.. Basic tab handling is a struggle for eclipse here, outright bugged to hell.
I also have the pleasure of working with STS (Spring Tool Suite) that, just as a recent example wont start a workspace cause "org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: Invalid thread access2.
Someone should put this abomination we call eclipse down, out of our misery.