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I use Eclipse desktop regularly. It has its quirks, as most all source software does, but it's more than sufficient to get the job done. In the same vain, I di

I use Eclipse desktop regularly. It has its quirks, as most all source software does, but it's more than sufficient to get the job done. In the same vain, I did try to learn the ins-outs of vscode and I wasn't impressed after a few months. It has about the 1/16 of the capabilities of Eclipse, and things are very broken pretty much 100% of the time, or it'll suddenly break when something auto updates. It's also, just obnoxious to use: popups, distractions that never go away, settings are in a schema-less json, and a completely incoherent user experience when you do something as minor as switch plugins. Compare that to regular ol' Eclipse, which presents a unified editing interface for every language and file type. I used IntelliJ for a brief stint and I would say it's very polished and a lot of small annoyances with Eclipse it doesn't have, and it exceeds Eclipse in several areas, but not to the point where I would go relearn an entire tool. So yeah... I'll probably just stick with Eclipse until I can't anymore!

hobs 2y ago
Yeah, I was lucky that early in my career a swdev turned me onto intellij stuff, it's sometimes second best at stuff and sometimes the bugs are 10 years old with no fixes in sight, but it still feels way better all the time than vscode.
constantcrying 2y ago
I have never used an IDE more opaque than Eclipse, you can feel the crusty Java code everywhere. I don't particularly like VSCode, but your criticisms are simply not true (anymore). It has GUI settings, it is pretty stable and you can make things go away.
- peterashford 2y ago
  Intellij, Resharper et al are Java IDEs and they're the best in the business
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
    ReSharper is written in C#, not Java.
  - neonsunset 2y ago
    Rider has the shared "IDE" part with IntelliJ and others, written in Java, but the back-end and numerous other components are written in C#.
- exabrial 2y ago
  I was speaking about my experience 8 months ago, so... yeah.
thiht 2y ago
> and things are very broken pretty much 100% of the time, or it'll suddenly break when something auto updates. It's also, just obnoxious to use: popups, distractions that never go away, settings are in a schema-less json, and a completely incoherent user experience when you do something as minor as switch plugins That’s… extremely far from my experience with VSCode, are you sure you’re even talking about VSCode? I’ve literally never had anything break after an update, not even a plugin. Not saying it doesn’t happen, because it definitely does (every version is followed by 1 or 2 patches in the following days), but it’s usually about pretty niche breakages. All popups and toasters have a cog wheel on the top right that let you tell them to never show up, if you wish. And to be fair, there are very few, the only ones that come to mind are "oh I know this file type; do you want to install the appropriate extension?", which is honestly a welcome hint (that you can disable globally if you don’t like it). What you call "distractions that never go away" I’m not sure, because almost everything in the UI can be hidden. What do you think count as a distraction? Regarding the settings, it’s plain wrong. The settings have had a visual editing interface for years, and the underlying JSON is definitely typed. If you add a key that doesn’t exist, it’ll be greyed out. Invalid values have a red squiggle. I have no idea what you mean with "incoherent user experience depending on plugins", specifically because the extension API doesn’t let extensions do incoherent stuff.
exabrial 2y ago
As an example: We have a build for a giant xyz customer system. Every part of the codebase is modern; it has thousands of JUnit5 test cases, 26+ modules. We've set the build up "correctly": following Maven best practices and it turns out, when you follow them, things are really quick with builds just under a few minutes. Eclipse does an amazing just handling a project this size. It also is able to do things VsCode simply cannot do. We had a enum we needed to move from a submodule to a a global one. Eclipse found all of the references, including ones in our documentation, strings, test cases, and even prop files for runtime config, and refactored the whole thing in a few clicks. We've had the same experience with IntelliJ actually too, where the tools are even more refined. Eclipse/IntelliJ are on a different plane. VsCode does have it's merits, but it's not really a full blown IDE.
- lye 2y ago
  This. I wish more users that prefer quite primitive text editors would broaden their horizons and learn at least one proper IDE. It's been honestly quite funny reading comments for the past few years about how amazing e.g. jump to definition is (compared to grepping and navigating manually) like it's some great new thing when we've had it in every IDE for decades (and much, much more). I remember using autocompletion/jump to definition/various refactorings in Borland IDEs back in 2004, and they were surely available long before then. The level of code refactoring tools available in IDEA dwarf anything vscode has been able to come up with, and I don't see that changing. And it's not just for Java (although it gets the best tooling), they're the best for every language that has any popularity at all. Including TypeScript, where IDEA has a significantly better performing lsp features than vscode. For example, it automatically finds copypasted code (including cases where variable names and code structure might differ) and can automatically extract a single implementation and generalize it for you with a single key press. If you have multiple classes with similar interfaces, it can extract the common bits into an interface and update the classes to become its implementations. It can shuffle types and methods around for you, automatically updating references (which you've mentioned). Autocompletion for absolutely everything, including difficult cases like e.g. SQL inside a Rust snippet inside Markdown. And much more.
  - 2y ago

hobs 2y ago

Yeah, I was lucky that early in my career a swdev turned me onto intellij stuff, it's sometimes second best at stuff and sometimes the bugs are 10 years old with no fixes in sight, but it still feels way better all the time than vscode.

constantcrying 2y ago

I have never used an IDE more opaque than Eclipse, you can feel the crusty Java code everywhere. I don't particularly like VSCode, but your criticisms are simply not true (anymore). It has GUI settings, it is pretty stable and you can make things go away.

peterashford 2y ago
Intellij, Resharper et al are Java IDEs and they're the best in the business
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
  ReSharper is written in C#, not Java.
- neonsunset 2y ago
  Rider has the shared "IDE" part with IntelliJ and others, written in Java, but the back-end and numerous other components are written in C#.
exabrial 2y ago
I was speaking about my experience 8 months ago, so... yeah.

thiht 2y ago

> and things are very broken pretty much 100% of the time, or it'll suddenly break when something auto updates. It's also, just obnoxious to use: popups, distractions that never go away, settings are in a schema-less json, and a completely incoherent user experience when you do something as minor as switch plugins That’s… extremely far from my experience with VSCode, are you sure you’re even talking about VSCode? I’ve literally never had anything break after an update, not even a plugin. Not saying it doesn’t happen, because it definitely does (every version is followed by 1 or 2 patches in the following days), but it’s usually about pretty niche breakages. All popups and toasters have a cog wheel on the top right that let you tell them to never show up, if you wish. And to be fair, there are very few, the only ones that come to mind are "oh I know this file type; do you want to install the appropriate extension?", which is honestly a welcome hint (that you can disable globally if you don’t like it). What you call "distractions that never go away" I’m not sure, because almost everything in the UI can be hidden. What do you think count as a distraction? Regarding the settings, it’s plain wrong. The settings have had a visual editing interface for years, and the underlying JSON is definitely typed. If you add a key that doesn’t exist, it’ll be greyed out. Invalid values have a red squiggle. I have no idea what you mean with "incoherent user experience depending on plugins", specifically because the extension API doesn’t let extensions do incoherent stuff.

exabrial 2y ago

As an example: We have a build for a giant xyz customer system. Every part of the codebase is modern; it has thousands of JUnit5 test cases, 26+ modules. We've set the build up "correctly": following Maven best practices and it turns out, when you follow them, things are really quick with builds just under a few minutes. Eclipse does an amazing just handling a project this size. It also is able to do things VsCode simply cannot do. We had a enum we needed to move from a submodule to a a global one. Eclipse found all of the references, including ones in our documentation, strings, test cases, and even prop files for runtime config, and refactored the whole thing in a few clicks. We've had the same experience with IntelliJ actually too, where the tools are even more refined. Eclipse/IntelliJ are on a different plane. VsCode does have it's merits, but it's not really a full blown IDE.

lye 2y ago
This. I wish more users that prefer quite primitive text editors would broaden their horizons and learn at least one proper IDE. It's been honestly quite funny reading comments for the past few years about how amazing e.g. jump to definition is (compared to grepping and navigating manually) like it's some great new thing when we've had it in every IDE for decades (and much, much more). I remember using autocompletion/jump to definition/various refactorings in Borland IDEs back in 2004, and they were surely available long before then. The level of code refactoring tools available in IDEA dwarf anything vscode has been able to come up with, and I don't see that changing. And it's not just for Java (although it gets the best tooling), they're the best for every language that has any popularity at all. Including TypeScript, where IDEA has a significantly better performing lsp features than vscode. For example, it automatically finds copypasted code (including cases where variable names and code structure might differ) and can automatically extract a single implementation and generalize it for you with a single key press. If you have multiple classes with similar interfaces, it can extract the common bits into an interface and update the classes to become its implementations. It can shuffle types and methods around for you, automatically updating references (which you've mentioned). Autocompletion for absolutely everything, including difficult cases like e.g. SQL inside a Rust snippet inside Markdown. And much more.
- 2y ago