9 ms·

Goodbye to Eclipse – the end of an era as an Eclipse plugin developer

95 points by dcminter 9y ago

sreque 9y ago
This post makes me very sad. I am often reminded that the best tech rarely wins. I've never had to use Intellij until my current job, but it is more obvious to me than ever than Eclipse, at least for Java development, is superior to Intellij. Was the free model not enough to sustain it, unlike Intellij, which sells its IDE, or is there another major cause for most of the world drifting to the inferior choice?
- bdamm 9y ago
  How is Eclipse better than IntelliJ? My experience with IntelliJ has been: * Faster than eclipse. * Works better / crashes less. * Less headaches setting up projects. * Far superior vi keymap support.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    And more/better keyboard shortcuts.
    - fma 9y ago
      Recently switched from Eclipse to IntelliJ. I've tried a few times in the past but I think I've reached the point of no return. More keyboard shortcuts! = better. In eclipse I probably used 10...still hunting for the equivalent. Then there's the fact that some shortcuts require two hands, or a large hand. If you're focused on debugging and you need to step out... Shift F8? Also the amount of times IntelliJ caches old files and screws up my testing is as much as eclipse... Which is probably my my biggest time waster. At least Intellij has the invalidate cache and restart... Which mostly works, till it doesn't, then I need to reimport.
  - foepys 9y ago
    Most importantly plugins in eclipse never really worked for me. They often broke during updates, the package servers were slow or unavailable, or I had to wait weeks for plugin updates to update to a newer version of Eclipse. IntelliJ has almost all important plugins and languages built-in. Even some quite nice frameworks.
    - strictfp 9y ago
      I agree, but ironic considering that you are focusing on OSGIs main selling points :)
  - badpun 9y ago
    I generally prefer IntelliJ to Eclipse, but what pains me in it is the slowness of the UI. When you open up a menu, you can literally watch as it is being painted to the screen. This is something that was instantenous on a 7 Mhz Amiga back in the nineties.
    - nickh9000 9y ago
      Maybe it is time to upgrade from that machine.
      - badpun 9y ago
        The machine is less than a year old... I'm betting the menu content is dynamic (based on preferences, maybe the code that's on the screen etc.) and they're recomputing the content before drawing it - but still, it's no excuse.
  - chapill 9y ago
    Eclipse git support is superior as well as the pom editor.
    - s73v3r_ 9y ago
      But SourceTree is better than both.
      - chapill 9y ago
        Haven't used SourceTree. That may be true, but I prefer having all my tools in one place, and eGit is quite good. Besides, eGit has Eclipse Mylyn integration, which is another killer feature Idea doesn't have.
    - Tharkun 9y ago
      Really? I hate Eclipse git "support" with a passion. I don't want my IDE to go anywhere near my version control. I'll take care of that myself, thankyouverymuch. The fact that Eclipse makes it nearly impossible to disable that git "support" downright angers me.
      - zmmmmm 9y ago
        Impossible? You just go to the Team menu and choose "Disconnect" or am I missing something?
        Tharkun 9y ago
        Yes. That's incompatible with my workflow. Projects are generated on the fly, each new project is automatically connected even if I don't want it to be. Having to manually disconnect each project is a pain. I just want a big "disable this plugin" button.
      - chapill 9y ago
        Close the git perspective? Right-click project, team -> disconnect perhaps? Honestly, I'm curious. It's never occurred to me that having it there, even if you don't use it, could be problematic. What is it touching that bothers you so much? It's not like it's going to jump in your folder and start committing stuff at random.
  - sreque 9y ago
    Sorry. I haven't had a chance to reply all day. The biggest reason I think Eclipse is better is because it has automatic incremental compilation built in. This feature is an absolute game changer in productivity. Visual Studio doesn't have it for C#. Intellij doesn't have it. As far as I know, Eclipse is the only Java IDE that does. Think about it. As you are editing and saving, a real compiler is recompiling your code. Any and all errors show up as feedback in the IDE immediately. Intellij tries to guess errors for you, but I find that it often misses things until you run a build manually. In conjunction with automatic incremental compilation is the problems window. I can't find anything remotely like it in Intellij. In a single window I can see all the errors and warnings in my workspace and address them. This is tremendously helpful, for instance, when I'm doing a complicated refactoring that can't be completely automated. Another insanely awesome feature of this compiler is that it compiles class files with errors in them. This lets you do things like run your program even if there are compiler errors in your project, or, even more usefully, run a unit test. In Intellij I get so frustrated when I can't run a unit test because some entirely unrelated java file in an entirely separate module has a compiler error because I haven't refreshed my gradle project since pulling from git. I really like seeing the warnings too. In every Intellij-driven project I've seen people do not care at all about warnings and the result is a lot sloppier code, including way more code that uses raw types, code that performs unchecked generic casts, code that makes mistakes with serialization, etc. In this sense Eclipse encourages better coding practices by putting the warnings your face in the problems tab. I've had the opposite experience with plugins in Eclipse. I've found that there's way more plugins than in Intellij and that they work better. For instance, I completely gave up on Intellij's code coverage builtin plugin. It flat out wasn't working. On the other hand, the plugin I've tried in Eclipse works great. I've also found Eclipse's FindBugs and Checkstyle plugins to work way better for me. I really dislike how Intellij handles debugging and spawning sub-processes. I remember at $lastjob when I still used Eclipse and I was helping an Intellij user try to debug something. I helped him figure out that he actually had about 5 sub-processes running in a debugger already and they were conflicting with each other. This kind of mistake I think is much harder to make in Eclipse. I also love the debug perspective and how it is separated from the regular perspective. I could go on and on. I've found Eclipse to always be much snappier and more responsive than Intellij and to use less memory. I've found its code formatter to be more feature rich and useful. I like Eclipse's look and feel a lot better. Intellij uses Swing and it shows. But, at the end of the day, above all else, its the incremental compilation and everything that builds off of it. I have to use Intellij at my current job and I absolutely wish we could use Eclipse instead. I find for instance that Intellij leaks memory and I frequently have to restart it once it gets to 8+ GB of usage. Also If I give it less than 6 GB of heap it runs insanely slowly.
- yodon 9y ago
  If most people are shifting from a free product to a paid product the chances are most of those people don’t consider the paid product to be inferior
  - nilsbunger 9y ago
    there's a free IntelliJ too
  - fma 9y ago
    My company paid for licenses, but I wouldn't pay for it personally. Same with JRebel. So a better answer may be, they have been improving their sales team.
- alyandon 9y ago
  I was a huge fan of Eclipse back in the day when I heavily used it for (mostly) Java development. However, for me it was death by a 1000 cuts. Workspaces getting into non-functional states that required wiping/rebuilding. Update sites constantly being moved to new URLs that required me manually making configuration changes just so the Eclipse update mechanism would work instead of spitting out cryptic error messages. Updates breaking the IDE to the point that I had to reinstall and start fresh and reconfigure everything from the ground up. Update checks causing every core on a Core i7-2600 to go to 100% cpu usage and remain that way for 30+ seconds. When I switched to IntelliJ, I suffered from none of those problems and it did not take me long before I went and purchased a personal license.
- Slackwise 9y ago
  > unlike Intellij, which sells its IDE The fancy version costs money, yes, but the community edition is free and Apache licensed. Here's the source code: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community > is there another major cause for most of the world drifting to the inferior choice? I've used both Eclipse and IntelliJ, as well as JetBrain's "ReSharper" tool in Visual Studio, and while the UI is obviously different, and in some ways better, some ways worse than Eclipse, the actual functionality and feature set of IntelliJ is clearly superior to Eclipse, especially all the refactoring and code smell tools. The feature list is just incredible and constantly increasing: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/ https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/ Also, IdeaVim is way superior to Eclim, if you care about Vim keybindings and modal editing.
  - richdougherty 9y ago
    I didn't know the free version was Apache licensed. That's great!
  - ryukafalz 9y ago
    Unfortunately, Google's fork (Android Studio) is not open source. Previous versions of Android Studio (based on Eclipse) were. Clearest example I've seen in a long time of why copyleft licenses are important. EDIT: I was wrong about this, see below thread.
    - noarchy 9y ago
      You can find instructions on both getting the source code, and building from source here: http://tools.android.com/build http://tools.android.com/build
      - ryukafalz 9y ago
        Ah! I stand corrected. I wasn't able to find a link to that info anywhere from the download page (https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html). I was also confused before when browsing through Google's Android repos because they don't seem to do any development on the master branch: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/idea/+/master https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/idea/+/maste... ...instead developing on project or release-specific branches: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/idea/+/studio-master-dev https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/idea/+/studi... I have to say, I'm glad to have been wrong!
- unclebucknasty 9y ago
  Perspective is funny. Eclipse has always been a klunky, kludgey behemoth to me. Never enjoyed using it.
- Lewton 9y ago
  I’m baffled by how anyone could prefer eclipse to Intellij and got much glee from downvoting your opinion. But I’ll retract my downvote if you add any reasons for why you think eclipse is superior?
  - 2sk21 9y ago
    I've happily been using Eclipse for years for Java development and have never used IntelliJ. I feel very productive in Eclipse and feel no urge to change.
    - hodgesrm 9y ago
      Same here. I don't see a big need to switch off Eclipse. It has all the features I need to be productive in Java.
  - UncleEntity 9y ago
    > But I’ll retract my downvote if you add any reasons for why you think eclipse is superior? Because downvoting isn't intended to stifle someone else's perfectly valid opinion maybe?
    - Lewton 9y ago
      Downvoting is for posts that add nothing to the discussion? Which his post literally doesn’t unless he actually explains why he prefers eclipse
  - mindcrime 9y ago
    I tried intellij and thought it was pretty crap. I don't remember all the things I didn't like, but I found it almost completely unusable.
  - sreque 9y ago
    I responded to someone else who asked the same question in this thread. Can I have an update now? :)
- guelo 9y ago
  I don't get it either, I've used Eclipse and IntelliJ for about 5 years each and there are a lot of things that I think Eclipse does better. But whenever I come across a thread like this one people are just aghast at the thought IntelliJ is not superior in all aspects. So there must be something to it but I'm not sure what to make of it.
  - strictfp 9y ago
    I find IntelliJ much better at navigation and refactoring.
- megaman22 9y ago
  For less than a dollar a day, access to the entire Jetbrains suite is a no-brainer.
- strictfp 9y ago
  Eclipse was awesome straight out of IBM, but IMO OSGI killed it of. OSGI is such a clunky framework to work with/around, I think it slowed down the devs enough to eventually make it outshined by others.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  " but it is more obvious to me than ever than Eclipse, at least for Java development, is superior to Intellij." This is a pretty huge claim. Care to share your reasoning?
- vkou 9y ago
  I can't count the amount of times I experienced an eclipse[1] in Eclipse. IntelliJ is snappy, has a far better search function, makes better use of screen space, lets me keep working while it compiles, and has yet to corrupt one of my projects. I've used both, personally, and for work, for a couple of years. I will take IntelliJ every time. [1] All the menus fading out, and becoming uninteractible, as it starts recompiling.
foepys 9y ago
Google did not rewrite their Android IDE. IntelliJ IDEA had Android support for years and Google collaborated with Jetbrains to create a dedicated IDE for Android. Jetbrains has a lot of experience in specialized IDE and corresponding plugins for their main IDE IntelliJ. It was the right choice by Google to support and utilize a team of smart developers that already created something superior to Eclipse ADT on their own.
- IshKebab 9y ago
  IMO Google made IntelliJ's Android support worse. They added a million items to the menus (like Eclipse), somehow made it slower, replaced IntelliJ's fast and simple project system with Gradle, which is slow and breaks all the time. Bit of a shame really. Still a million times better than Eclipse though.
  - adadad3442 9y ago
    IntelliJ doesn't have a dedicated build system. You can choose from no system, Maven, and Gradle. No system is often good enough for basic projects, but not Android development. Support libraries, configuration, API versions, NDK support, etc. make Gradle a requirement. Gradle is the official build system of Android for a reason, it's not something that Google just added willy-nilly to Android Studio. As an Android developer, I LOVE Gradle. I think it's a vastly superior build system. I also use it for complex desktop applications, and applications that run on both desktop and Android, using shared code and OS-dependent code (the module system makes this very easy to organize).
InTheArena 9y ago
I made the switch to jetbrains a while ago, but the one feature i really really miss is the absolute to focus on a set of files and resources and hide all the other unrelated code. Mylyn alone makes me go back every now and then, but eclipse is just too bloated and unpredictable
- laurence-myers 9y ago
  I think you can achieve this by creating a "Scope" and filtering to it in the Project view.
- strictfp 9y ago
  IMO you won't miss it in the long run. IntelliJ is good enough to not require such an interface to keep you focused. There is a similar feature, but I never used it.
pvg 9y ago
This is from July 2017.
onychomys 9y ago
Come, ex-eclipsians, join the weirdo minority who use netbeans! We don't bite, I promise! And there are literally dozens of us across the world!
- your-nanny 9y ago
  I like netbeans but was absolutely unusable on my brand new iMac; the lag.
- eitland 9y ago
  And at least two of us frequent HN it seems! I'm also an ex-eclipse user who have been a paying IntelliJ user before settling with Netbeans. Can confirm that we don't bite.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
I went to a seminar hosted by FAI to talk about Cypress wireless chips and Murata Modules. Their IDE "WICD" is based on Eclipse. When I saw that I was surprised because I thought Eclipse was not getting much active development. Their use of it was faster than I remember but just as difficult to navigate.
yugf 9y ago
fuck jetbrains
jay-anderson 9y ago
We're a mostly java shop at work and I'm one of the last few hold outs still on eclipse. I'm used to it and it mostly does what I need. I use the excellent vrapper (http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/ http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/), but even that has ceased development it seems. Last I tried intellij the vi plugin was unusable for me. I periodically think it's time to give it a try again. It is too bad the eclipse seems to be falling behind and losing mindshare.
- nambit 9y ago
  Something else you could try is http://eclim.org/ http://eclim.org/ . It's the only thing I really miss about eclipse.
didibus 9y ago
I think there's opportunity for a new, more modern IDE. Something better then Eclipse and IntelliJ, but that's not built on top of JavaScript. Doubt there's the funding for it though, but there's definitely the need (of devs hungry for it, but not willing to pay anything for it either).
- whatever_dude 9y ago
  > but that's not built on top of JavaScript I know this is a turn-off for a lot of people, but I still don't see why. Why you need an IDE that doesn't use JS? VSC feels super fast to me. It certainly has better performance than Eclipse ever had, and feels less janky than IntelliJ. I know some people like the light speed of Sublime, but to me there's a certain threshold where it's just fast enough. And that's where VSC is.
  - webkike 9y ago
    JS just isn't a great language for text manipulation. Even if you ignore that it is a pretty slow language.
    - z3t4 9y ago
      Most JS engines have very fast rope-like implementations of strings in JavaScript. String operations in modern JS engines are very fast and hard to beat in any language. Updating the text buffer is fast. Displaying it on the screen is the slow part. Anything touching the DOM is slow. But you can use the 2d Canvas instead, which is fast.
  - 13years 9y ago
    Also, if we ever get something like Mozilla's Servo technology in something like Electron combined with WebAssembly and you truly have a very powerful platform with lots of development options
    - krapp 9y ago
      > something like Mozilla's Servo technology in something like Electron combined with WebAssembly (...) That still seems too heavy to me. Surely a native runtime for WebAssembly doesn't necessarily require Node and Chromium and all of Electron's bloat?
chapill 9y ago
To the author, I actually used RustDT for a while and liked it. I gave up on it when I found it was supported by only one person. I predicted that you would lose interest and move on to something else, and my workflow would have then depend on abandonware. A gentle bit of advice: Team up with someone as enthusiastic about the idea as you. If you can't find anyone interested, that's probably a signal not to work on the thing. You might want to check out sulong, https://github.com/graalvm/sulong https://github.com/graalvm/sulong It sounds like a project you could contribute a lot to. There are a few core committers and it sounds like you're interested in staying on the JVM. Compiling Rust to JVM and having a decent IDE for the language would be really nice too. Finally, remember one thing about IntelliJ. It's popular because of Google, and as you have witnessed with Eclipse, Google is fickle. Chasing Google's whims seems like a bad idea in the long run.
- pas 9y ago
  > IntelliJ [is] popular because of Google, ... IDEA is and was pretty well established in the Java/Scala world. Android Studio is the cherry on top.
13years 9y ago
Yes, as an eclipse plugin developer myself, I made this to bring as much of the lightweight experience from sublime and vscode to Eclipse. It is basically a next-gen command palette. Much better than the builtin quick access in Eclipse. https://github.com/dakaraphi/eclipse-plugin-commander https://github.com/dakaraphi/eclipse-plugin-commander
sigi45 9y ago
I love eclipse and we used eclipse for over a year until we switched to intellij. The main reason: Updating intellij just works. Updating eclipse on arch linux meant that i have to readd the marketplace url for the proper version, add the maven plugin again and than it worked. Yes this small detail sucked and yes it just works better in intellij.
Tharkun 9y ago
I've been using Eclipse for what seems like forever. But it feels like with each new release, Eclipse gets worse. More freezes, more crashes, more really weird behaviour, slower code completion. The fact that I still can't turn off retarded core plugins (like the horrible Git plugin) bugs me to no end. Every time I install a new version, I have to remember to go in and delete the Git plugin jars because it fucks up my workflow. I'll keep using it, because IntelliJ is almost as bad and has a GUI paradigm I can't get used to. But eventually that balance is going to shift. If Eclipse is suffering from a lack of man power, they might want to consider making it easier to contribute.
- chapill 9y ago
  >I deleted core jars from the distribution. It freezes and crashes all the time. Wow, Eclipse sucks. Thanks dude. I just sprayed coffee all over my keyboard. The laugh was worth it though.
ivcha 9y ago
I don't understand what exactly is the reason people don't like Eclipse. The features and the overall feeling of using the IDE is great, that's why I am still using Eclipse (mostly Java and Scala development), so are many of my colleagues. I guess there are some downsides, like slower leading times and a bit clunky compilation process, but other than that, it's a solid IDE.
- zmmmmm 9y ago
  Everyone complains that it is bloated and slow, but I think a lot of people run it with too little memory. I always change the default settings to give it 2g of memory and it always runs fast. Some people think that's ridiculous, but given I spend 70% of my time in that environment, I'm more than happy to have it use that much memory.
zmmmmm 9y ago
I was hoping the author would talk more about the underlying technical reasons for the problems, as I would have thought he would have insight into that as a plugin developer. It seems like his reasons are really mostly around it losing mindshare and being a waste of his life and the technical is actually less important (even if it is a cause of the former). I still use eclipse because I haven't found anything else that embraces true full multi-language development the way Eclipse does. That is, in one IDE I have front end, middle tier and back end code all in different languages, sitting next to each other as first class citizens. I can set a breakpoint in my PHP code and my Java code and my Python code, and I can have the source windows right next to each other and debug them in parallel. I just don't know anything else that does that so well. I also find Eclipse's incremental compile model invaluable. I was kind of shocked when I tried out IntelliJ and had to wait 15 seconds while it ran Gradle for it to tell me about a compile error. So I'm definitely in the club of being sad it's losing mindshare.
ssebastianj 9y ago
Something I didn't know until recently was that PyCharm debugger was a cross-project cooperation between PyDev people and PyCharm people [0] [0] https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2016/05/debugger-interview-with-pydev-and-pycharm/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2016/05/debugger-intervie...
naviehuynh 9y ago
Bye Eclipse, you won't be missed >.<

95 points by dcminter 9y ago

This post makes me very sad. I am often reminded that the best tech rarely wins. I've never had to use Intellij until my current job, but it is more obvious to me than ever than Eclipse, at least for Java development, is superior to Intellij. Was the free model not enough to sustain it, unlike Intellij, which sells its IDE, or is there another major cause for most of the world drifting to the inferior choice?

bdamm 9y ago
How is Eclipse better than IntelliJ? My experience with IntelliJ has been: * Faster than eclipse. * Works better / crashes less. * Less headaches setting up projects. * Far superior vi keymap support.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  And more/better keyboard shortcuts.
  - fma 9y ago
    Recently switched from Eclipse to IntelliJ. I've tried a few times in the past but I think I've reached the point of no return. More keyboard shortcuts! = better. In eclipse I probably used 10...still hunting for the equivalent. Then there's the fact that some shortcuts require two hands, or a large hand. If you're focused on debugging and you need to step out... Shift F8? Also the amount of times IntelliJ caches old files and screws up my testing is as much as eclipse... Which is probably my my biggest time waster. At least Intellij has the invalidate cache and restart... Which mostly works, till it doesn't, then I need to reimport.
- foepys 9y ago
  Most importantly plugins in eclipse never really worked for me. They often broke during updates, the package servers were slow or unavailable, or I had to wait weeks for plugin updates to update to a newer version of Eclipse. IntelliJ has almost all important plugins and languages built-in. Even some quite nice frameworks.
  - strictfp 9y ago
    I agree, but ironic considering that you are focusing on OSGIs main selling points :)
- badpun 9y ago
  I generally prefer IntelliJ to Eclipse, but what pains me in it is the slowness of the UI. When you open up a menu, you can literally watch as it is being painted to the screen. This is something that was instantenous on a 7 Mhz Amiga back in the nineties.
  - nickh9000 9y ago
    Maybe it is time to upgrade from that machine.
    - badpun 9y ago
      The machine is less than a year old... I'm betting the menu content is dynamic (based on preferences, maybe the code that's on the screen etc.) and they're recomputing the content before drawing it - but still, it's no excuse.
- chapill 9y ago
  Eclipse git support is superior as well as the pom editor.
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    But SourceTree is better than both.
    - chapill 9y ago
      Haven't used SourceTree. That may be true, but I prefer having all my tools in one place, and eGit is quite good. Besides, eGit has Eclipse Mylyn integration, which is another killer feature Idea doesn't have.
  - Tharkun 9y ago
    Really? I hate Eclipse git "support" with a passion. I don't want my IDE to go anywhere near my version control. I'll take care of that myself, thankyouverymuch. The fact that Eclipse makes it nearly impossible to disable that git "support" downright angers me.
    - zmmmmm 9y ago
      Impossible? You just go to the Team menu and choose "Disconnect" or am I missing something?
      - Tharkun 9y ago
        Yes. That's incompatible with my workflow. Projects are generated on the fly, each new project is automatically connected even if I don't want it to be. Having to manually disconnect each project is a pain. I just want a big "disable this plugin" button.
    - chapill 9y ago
      Close the git perspective? Right-click project, team -> disconnect perhaps? Honestly, I'm curious. It's never occurred to me that having it there, even if you don't use it, could be problematic. What is it touching that bothers you so much? It's not like it's going to jump in your folder and start committing stuff at random.
- sreque 9y ago
  Sorry. I haven't had a chance to reply all day. The biggest reason I think Eclipse is better is because it has automatic incremental compilation built in. This feature is an absolute game changer in productivity. Visual Studio doesn't have it for C#. Intellij doesn't have it. As far as I know, Eclipse is the only Java IDE that does. Think about it. As you are editing and saving, a real compiler is recompiling your code. Any and all errors show up as feedback in the IDE immediately. Intellij tries to guess errors for you, but I find that it often misses things until you run a build manually. In conjunction with automatic incremental compilation is the problems window. I can't find anything remotely like it in Intellij. In a single window I can see all the errors and warnings in my workspace and address them. This is tremendously helpful, for instance, when I'm doing a complicated refactoring that can't be completely automated. Another insanely awesome feature of this compiler is that it compiles class files with errors in them. This lets you do things like run your program even if there are compiler errors in your project, or, even more usefully, run a unit test. In Intellij I get so frustrated when I can't run a unit test because some entirely unrelated java file in an entirely separate module has a compiler error because I haven't refreshed my gradle project since pulling from git. I really like seeing the warnings too. In every Intellij-driven project I've seen people do not care at all about warnings and the result is a lot sloppier code, including way more code that uses raw types, code that performs unchecked generic casts, code that makes mistakes with serialization, etc. In this sense Eclipse encourages better coding practices by putting the warnings your face in the problems tab. I've had the opposite experience with plugins in Eclipse. I've found that there's way more plugins than in Intellij and that they work better. For instance, I completely gave up on Intellij's code coverage builtin plugin. It flat out wasn't working. On the other hand, the plugin I've tried in Eclipse works great. I've also found Eclipse's FindBugs and Checkstyle plugins to work way better for me. I really dislike how Intellij handles debugging and spawning sub-processes. I remember at $lastjob when I still used Eclipse and I was helping an Intellij user try to debug something. I helped him figure out that he actually had about 5 sub-processes running in a debugger already and they were conflicting with each other. This kind of mistake I think is much harder to make in Eclipse. I also love the debug perspective and how it is separated from the regular perspective. I could go on and on. I've found Eclipse to always be much snappier and more responsive than Intellij and to use less memory. I've found its code formatter to be more feature rich and useful. I like Eclipse's look and feel a lot better. Intellij uses Swing and it shows. But, at the end of the day, above all else, its the incremental compilation and everything that builds off of it. I have to use Intellij at my current job and I absolutely wish we could use Eclipse instead. I find for instance that Intellij leaks memory and I frequently have to restart it once it gets to 8+ GB of usage. Also If I give it less than 6 GB of heap it runs insanely slowly.
yodon 9y ago
If most people are shifting from a free product to a paid product the chances are most of those people don’t consider the paid product to be inferior
- nilsbunger 9y ago
  there's a free IntelliJ too
- fma 9y ago
  My company paid for licenses, but I wouldn't pay for it personally. Same with JRebel. So a better answer may be, they have been improving their sales team.
alyandon 9y ago
I was a huge fan of Eclipse back in the day when I heavily used it for (mostly) Java development. However, for me it was death by a 1000 cuts. Workspaces getting into non-functional states that required wiping/rebuilding. Update sites constantly being moved to new URLs that required me manually making configuration changes just so the Eclipse update mechanism would work instead of spitting out cryptic error messages. Updates breaking the IDE to the point that I had to reinstall and start fresh and reconfigure everything from the ground up. Update checks causing every core on a Core i7-2600 to go to 100% cpu usage and remain that way for 30+ seconds. When I switched to IntelliJ, I suffered from none of those problems and it did not take me long before I went and purchased a personal license.
Slackwise 9y ago
> unlike Intellij, which sells its IDE The fancy version costs money, yes, but the community edition is free and Apache licensed. Here's the source code: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community > is there another major cause for most of the world drifting to the inferior choice? I've used both Eclipse and IntelliJ, as well as JetBrain's "ReSharper" tool in Visual Studio, and while the UI is obviously different, and in some ways better, some ways worse than Eclipse, the actual functionality and feature set of IntelliJ is clearly superior to Eclipse, especially all the refactoring and code smell tools. The feature list is just incredible and constantly increasing: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/ https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/ Also, IdeaVim is way superior to Eclim, if you care about Vim keybindings and modal editing.
- richdougherty 9y ago
  I didn't know the free version was Apache licensed. That's great!
- ryukafalz 9y ago
  Unfortunately, Google's fork (Android Studio) is not open source. Previous versions of Android Studio (based on Eclipse) were. Clearest example I've seen in a long time of why copyleft licenses are important. EDIT: I was wrong about this, see below thread.
  - noarchy 9y ago
    You can find instructions on both getting the source code, and building from source here: http://tools.android.com/build http://tools.android.com/build
    - ryukafalz 9y ago
      Ah! I stand corrected. I wasn't able to find a link to that info anywhere from the download page (https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html). I was also confused before when browsing through Google's Android repos because they don't seem to do any development on the master branch: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/idea/+/master https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/idea/+/maste... ...instead developing on project or release-specific branches: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/idea/+/studio-master-dev https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/idea/+/studi... I have to say, I'm glad to have been wrong!
unclebucknasty 9y ago
Perspective is funny. Eclipse has always been a klunky, kludgey behemoth to me. Never enjoyed using it.
Lewton 9y ago
I’m baffled by how anyone could prefer eclipse to Intellij and got much glee from downvoting your opinion. But I’ll retract my downvote if you add any reasons for why you think eclipse is superior?
- 2sk21 9y ago
  I've happily been using Eclipse for years for Java development and have never used IntelliJ. I feel very productive in Eclipse and feel no urge to change.
  - hodgesrm 9y ago
    Same here. I don't see a big need to switch off Eclipse. It has all the features I need to be productive in Java.
- UncleEntity 9y ago
  > But I’ll retract my downvote if you add any reasons for why you think eclipse is superior? Because downvoting isn't intended to stifle someone else's perfectly valid opinion maybe?
  - Lewton 9y ago
    Downvoting is for posts that add nothing to the discussion? Which his post literally doesn’t unless he actually explains why he prefers eclipse
- mindcrime 9y ago
  I tried intellij and thought it was pretty crap. I don't remember all the things I didn't like, but I found it almost completely unusable.
- sreque 9y ago
  I responded to someone else who asked the same question in this thread. Can I have an update now? :)
guelo 9y ago
I don't get it either, I've used Eclipse and IntelliJ for about 5 years each and there are a lot of things that I think Eclipse does better. But whenever I come across a thread like this one people are just aghast at the thought IntelliJ is not superior in all aspects. So there must be something to it but I'm not sure what to make of it.
- strictfp 9y ago
  I find IntelliJ much better at navigation and refactoring.
megaman22 9y ago
For less than a dollar a day, access to the entire Jetbrains suite is a no-brainer.
strictfp 9y ago
Eclipse was awesome straight out of IBM, but IMO OSGI killed it of. OSGI is such a clunky framework to work with/around, I think it slowed down the devs enough to eventually make it outshined by others.
s73v3r_ 9y ago
" but it is more obvious to me than ever than Eclipse, at least for Java development, is superior to Intellij." This is a pretty huge claim. Care to share your reasoning?
vkou 9y ago
I can't count the amount of times I experienced an eclipse[1] in Eclipse. IntelliJ is snappy, has a far better search function, makes better use of screen space, lets me keep working while it compiles, and has yet to corrupt one of my projects. I've used both, personally, and for work, for a couple of years. I will take IntelliJ every time. [1] All the menus fading out, and becoming uninteractible, as it starts recompiling.

foepys 9y ago

Google did not rewrite their Android IDE. IntelliJ IDEA had Android support for years and Google collaborated with Jetbrains to create a dedicated IDE for Android. Jetbrains has a lot of experience in specialized IDE and corresponding plugins for their main IDE IntelliJ. It was the right choice by Google to support and utilize a team of smart developers that already created something superior to Eclipse ADT on their own.

IshKebab 9y ago
IMO Google made IntelliJ's Android support worse. They added a million items to the menus (like Eclipse), somehow made it slower, replaced IntelliJ's fast and simple project system with Gradle, which is slow and breaks all the time. Bit of a shame really. Still a million times better than Eclipse though.
- adadad3442 9y ago
  IntelliJ doesn't have a dedicated build system. You can choose from no system, Maven, and Gradle. No system is often good enough for basic projects, but not Android development. Support libraries, configuration, API versions, NDK support, etc. make Gradle a requirement. Gradle is the official build system of Android for a reason, it's not something that Google just added willy-nilly to Android Studio. As an Android developer, I LOVE Gradle. I think it's a vastly superior build system. I also use it for complex desktop applications, and applications that run on both desktop and Android, using shared code and OS-dependent code (the module system makes this very easy to organize).

InTheArena 9y ago

I made the switch to jetbrains a while ago, but the one feature i really really miss is the absolute to focus on a set of files and resources and hide all the other unrelated code. Mylyn alone makes me go back every now and then, but eclipse is just too bloated and unpredictable

laurence-myers 9y ago
I think you can achieve this by creating a "Scope" and filtering to it in the Project view.
strictfp 9y ago
IMO you won't miss it in the long run. IntelliJ is good enough to not require such an interface to keep you focused. There is a similar feature, but I never used it.

pvg 9y ago

This is from July 2017.

onychomys 9y ago

Come, ex-eclipsians, join the weirdo minority who use netbeans! We don't bite, I promise! And there are literally dozens of us across the world!

your-nanny 9y ago
I like netbeans but was absolutely unusable on my brand new iMac; the lag.
eitland 9y ago
And at least two of us frequent HN it seems! I'm also an ex-eclipse user who have been a paying IntelliJ user before settling with Netbeans. Can confirm that we don't bite.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

I went to a seminar hosted by FAI to talk about Cypress wireless chips and Murata Modules. Their IDE "WICD" is based on Eclipse. When I saw that I was surprised because I thought Eclipse was not getting much active development. Their use of it was faster than I remember but just as difficult to navigate.

yugf 9y ago

fuck jetbrains

jay-anderson 9y ago

We're a mostly java shop at work and I'm one of the last few hold outs still on eclipse. I'm used to it and it mostly does what I need. I use the excellent vrapper (http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/ http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/), but even that has ceased development it seems. Last I tried intellij the vi plugin was unusable for me. I periodically think it's time to give it a try again. It is too bad the eclipse seems to be falling behind and losing mindshare.

nambit 9y ago
Something else you could try is http://eclim.org/ http://eclim.org/ . It's the only thing I really miss about eclipse.

didibus 9y ago

I think there's opportunity for a new, more modern IDE. Something better then Eclipse and IntelliJ, but that's not built on top of JavaScript. Doubt there's the funding for it though, but there's definitely the need (of devs hungry for it, but not willing to pay anything for it either).

whatever_dude 9y ago
> but that's not built on top of JavaScript I know this is a turn-off for a lot of people, but I still don't see why. Why you need an IDE that doesn't use JS? VSC feels super fast to me. It certainly has better performance than Eclipse ever had, and feels less janky than IntelliJ. I know some people like the light speed of Sublime, but to me there's a certain threshold where it's just fast enough. And that's where VSC is.
- webkike 9y ago
  JS just isn't a great language for text manipulation. Even if you ignore that it is a pretty slow language.
  - z3t4 9y ago
    Most JS engines have very fast rope-like implementations of strings in JavaScript. String operations in modern JS engines are very fast and hard to beat in any language. Updating the text buffer is fast. Displaying it on the screen is the slow part. Anything touching the DOM is slow. But you can use the 2d Canvas instead, which is fast.
- 13years 9y ago
  Also, if we ever get something like Mozilla's Servo technology in something like Electron combined with WebAssembly and you truly have a very powerful platform with lots of development options
  - krapp 9y ago
    > something like Mozilla's Servo technology in something like Electron combined with WebAssembly (...) That still seems too heavy to me. Surely a native runtime for WebAssembly doesn't necessarily require Node and Chromium and all of Electron's bloat?

chapill 9y ago

To the author, I actually used RustDT for a while and liked it. I gave up on it when I found it was supported by only one person. I predicted that you would lose interest and move on to something else, and my workflow would have then depend on abandonware. A gentle bit of advice: Team up with someone as enthusiastic about the idea as you. If you can't find anyone interested, that's probably a signal not to work on the thing. You might want to check out sulong, https://github.com/graalvm/sulong https://github.com/graalvm/sulong It sounds like a project you could contribute a lot to. There are a few core committers and it sounds like you're interested in staying on the JVM. Compiling Rust to JVM and having a decent IDE for the language would be really nice too. Finally, remember one thing about IntelliJ. It's popular because of Google, and as you have witnessed with Eclipse, Google is fickle. Chasing Google's whims seems like a bad idea in the long run.

pas 9y ago
> IntelliJ [is] popular because of Google, ... IDEA is and was pretty well established in the Java/Scala world. Android Studio is the cherry on top.

13years 9y ago

Yes, as an eclipse plugin developer myself, I made this to bring as much of the lightweight experience from sublime and vscode to Eclipse. It is basically a next-gen command palette. Much better than the builtin quick access in Eclipse. https://github.com/dakaraphi/eclipse-plugin-commander https://github.com/dakaraphi/eclipse-plugin-commander

sigi45 9y ago

I love eclipse and we used eclipse for over a year until we switched to intellij. The main reason: Updating intellij just works. Updating eclipse on arch linux meant that i have to readd the marketplace url for the proper version, add the maven plugin again and than it worked. Yes this small detail sucked and yes it just works better in intellij.

Tharkun 9y ago

I've been using Eclipse for what seems like forever. But it feels like with each new release, Eclipse gets worse. More freezes, more crashes, more really weird behaviour, slower code completion. The fact that I still can't turn off retarded core plugins (like the horrible Git plugin) bugs me to no end. Every time I install a new version, I have to remember to go in and delete the Git plugin jars because it fucks up my workflow. I'll keep using it, because IntelliJ is almost as bad and has a GUI paradigm I can't get used to. But eventually that balance is going to shift. If Eclipse is suffering from a lack of man power, they might want to consider making it easier to contribute.

chapill 9y ago
>I deleted core jars from the distribution. It freezes and crashes all the time. Wow, Eclipse sucks. Thanks dude. I just sprayed coffee all over my keyboard. The laugh was worth it though.

ivcha 9y ago

I don't understand what exactly is the reason people don't like Eclipse. The features and the overall feeling of using the IDE is great, that's why I am still using Eclipse (mostly Java and Scala development), so are many of my colleagues. I guess there are some downsides, like slower leading times and a bit clunky compilation process, but other than that, it's a solid IDE.

zmmmmm 9y ago
Everyone complains that it is bloated and slow, but I think a lot of people run it with too little memory. I always change the default settings to give it 2g of memory and it always runs fast. Some people think that's ridiculous, but given I spend 70% of my time in that environment, I'm more than happy to have it use that much memory.

zmmmmm 9y ago

I was hoping the author would talk more about the underlying technical reasons for the problems, as I would have thought he would have insight into that as a plugin developer. It seems like his reasons are really mostly around it losing mindshare and being a waste of his life and the technical is actually less important (even if it is a cause of the former). I still use eclipse because I haven't found anything else that embraces true full multi-language development the way Eclipse does. That is, in one IDE I have front end, middle tier and back end code all in different languages, sitting next to each other as first class citizens. I can set a breakpoint in my PHP code and my Java code and my Python code, and I can have the source windows right next to each other and debug them in parallel. I just don't know anything else that does that so well. I also find Eclipse's incremental compile model invaluable. I was kind of shocked when I tried out IntelliJ and had to wait 15 seconds while it ran Gradle for it to tell me about a compile error. So I'm definitely in the club of being sad it's losing mindshare.

ssebastianj 9y ago

Something I didn't know until recently was that PyCharm debugger was a cross-project cooperation between PyDev people and PyCharm people [0] [0] https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2016/05/debugger-interview-with-pydev-and-pycharm/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2016/05/debugger-intervie...

naviehuynh 9y ago

Bye Eclipse, you won't be missed >.<