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I'm an eclipse user and love it. I don't understand why so many people hate it. However, I keep hearing, from very respectable developers, that intellij is a fa

I'm an eclipse user and love it. I don't understand why so many people hate it. However, I keep hearing, from very respectable developers, that intellij is a far better IDE. Even as I type this, I have an eclipse window open for main development and an intellij window open with some test code so I can get used to it, and see what the hype is about. One thing is for sure, intellij (the dark theme) looks beautiful. Makes me wonder if eclipse should still be spending (wasting?) resources developing their own GUI toolkit.

TheCapn 13y ago
Not sure what I use at home (commenting from work) but I have a dark theme running on my eclipse with great success. Its worth a google for the plugin and themes developed by users.
- paperwork 13y ago
  I did install some sort of theme manager for eclipse. It changed the color of the editor, but not rest of eclipse. When I maximised the editor window, it did look nice and felt easier on my eyes. However, when other windows and widgets were visible, that dark editor just looked out of place :)
shawabawa3 13y ago
My main problems with eclipse: 1. Startup time. I just ran it twice on my machine. First time it took 20seconds before showing the splash, then 10 seconds after that (I'd never launched it before). Second time it took over 5 seconds to launch completely 2. Cluttered UI. menu bar + status bar + project explorer + tasks + outline take up between 20 and 70% of the window depending on how big I have the window (god help me if i try to use it on my old laptop with its 1300x700 resolution) 3. Difficulty of editing stand alone files. It's just a pain in the arse editing files that aren't in the project, and that you don't want to be in the project For comparison, sublime text 2 launches in <1second on the same machine, and that includes restoring 100% of the previous working state, including unsaved changes to all files, even if the computer crashed and it wasn't closed down properly. edit: I almost forgot 4. It also takes 1-5seconds to close.
- paperwork 13y ago
  If you've used both, wouldn't you consider Eclipse and sublime text to be two very different tools? If you want to quickly edit some text, then Eclipse is overkil. If you are going to write programs for 8 hours a day, then Eclipse's benefits far out weigh its problems. To me, it is the difference between a car and a bike. The two serve different purposes. I don't mean to downplay problems with Eclipse. I remember that it was confusing when I first started using it. In the intervening years, I think the problem with eclipse is one of missed opportunities (or misplaced priorities).
  - liquidise 13y ago
    This is a boat i bought into only in college. Once my professional career started, and i started viewing coding as an artisan craft, i realized that less tends to be more. I want an editor that i never have to wait for. Every IDE i have tried has time where i pause waiting for it to try and do something. Give me column editing, multiple cursors, and snippets and i will show you an editor i can code a system of any real size with.
    - philbarr 13y ago
      "column editing, multiple cursors, and snippets" It's more about smart refactoring, code completion, extensibility, project management, "open type hierarchy", "show usages", etc. You kind of need these things in big projects. Especially enterprise Java ones. "Of any real size" - I dispute you've written one that counts.
      - liquidise 13y ago
        Size in terms of software (and data) is always a perspective thing to be sure. I have worked on 2 separate millions of LoC codebases. Maybe its my ignorance, but i think there is more difference between a 10k Loc vs a 2mm Loc than 2mm vs 20mm. I might be wrong, I've never worked in something an order of magnitude larger than a few million.
    - ramchip 13y ago
Zigurd 13y ago
New users acquire a very bad impression of Eclipse because it is very badly behaved in terms of GUI conventions: It offers to do things that make no sense. For example, if I have an Android project selected, four out of the siz "Run as..." actions it offers make no sense. Run my Android app as a Java applet? How? Why? Doesn't it know an Android app can't do that? This could be very hard to fix. Does Eclipse have all the interfaces defined for correct behavior in all cases? how long would it take all the plugin developers to code the implementations for "Is this action sensible on this object?" and have that happen every time the selection changes?
- imissmyjuno 13y ago
  The keyboard shortcuts make no sense on OS X, either. Most of them are very Windows centric. Eg pressing anything on the F row or that uses Ctrl is not very native. I feel like Eclipse on OSX is an afterthought
fournm 13y ago
I don't know if I would quite go with loving Eclipse (working in an environment where workspaces are practically required instead of only closing/opening projects and having to redefine settings constantly is a pain) at this point, having never really used IntelliJ either, but... I will say as someone working with SWT right now that I'm not a fan.
LVB 13y ago
The number one reason I don't like it is performance. Things like typing and switching tabs shouldn't be slow. So I'm stuck choosing between having a bad experience or spending time in forums learning the latest .ini file tweaks and/or what features to disable to get normal editor performance. (This on a recent MBP.) Not sure how IntelliJ compares in this regard.
Taylorious 13y ago
I don't like Eclipse because it doesn't do the stuff that a basic IDE is suppose to do either at all or very well. Perhaps you have noticed that when you type in Intellij, it actually makes good suggestions and auto completes properly.
- marshray 13y ago
  I've tried to like Eclipse a few times over the years. What kills it for me is (paraphrasing a bug report ISTR) "We don't support rectangular selection and probably never will."
  - werdnagreb 13y ago
    That's not true. Alt-Cmd+A toggles block selection on macs. Not sure what the keybinding is on windows.
    - marshray 13y ago
      Sounds like they added the feature then. Does paste of a block selection work correctly too?
      - robinst 13y ago
        It does, yes. A general tip to find features like this: Press Ctrl+3 (Cmd+3 on Mac OS X) or type in the "quick access" search bar in newer Eclipse versions. It shows the command and the shortcut. Also useful for toggling "Show Whitespace Characters" without needing to have the button in the toolbar, jumping to a preference page, etc.
smrtinsert 13y ago
That's just Textmate blah blah making its way into the mainstream. Can you explain the Intellij draw to me? I've spent the last two days off and on look at the community edition via installion and googling and I don't see the killer feature set that everyone is talking about. It looks like a JEdits older brother to me.
fusiongyro 13y ago
> I don't understand why so many people hate it. On a fresh computer, download and install Netbeans 7.3 and Eclipse 4.2. Then check out a Mavenized JSF project from and run it. Netbeans does Maven and Subversion out of the box, so I don't have to install any plugins. I point it at Tomcat, and it will build and deploy the app for me with one click of a button and zero configuration. I have never successfully gotten all the plugins and everything necessary to do this with Eclipse working. The member of our team that uses Eclipse deploys wars manually for this reason. IntelliJ, for what it's worth, also seems to do all of this out of the box (I used it for about a day, and concluded it wasn't enough better than Netbeans). The easiest way for me to describe Eclipse's problem and why I don't like it is to simply say it is worse. It's fat, slow to start up, slow to use, requires hours of complicated setup to get it to do what you want. Netbeans utterly wrecks it for every use case I have. Outside Java, I use Emacs mostly. I would actually love to get Eclipse working so I can use eclim, but the configuration story is just so horrible. Installing plugins is slow. Choose an update site? Wait five minutes for the UI to respond while it downloads a sitemap? Which of these five plugins is the Subversion plugin I need? What's Mylyn, and do I need integration with it or not? And so forth.

TheCapn 13y ago

Not sure what I use at home (commenting from work) but I have a dark theme running on my eclipse with great success. Its worth a google for the plugin and themes developed by users.

paperwork 13y ago
I did install some sort of theme manager for eclipse. It changed the color of the editor, but not rest of eclipse. When I maximised the editor window, it did look nice and felt easier on my eyes. However, when other windows and widgets were visible, that dark editor just looked out of place :)

shawabawa3 13y ago

My main problems with eclipse: 1. Startup time. I just ran it twice on my machine. First time it took 20seconds before showing the splash, then 10 seconds after that (I'd never launched it before). Second time it took over 5 seconds to launch completely 2. Cluttered UI. menu bar + status bar + project explorer + tasks + outline take up between 20 and 70% of the window depending on how big I have the window (god help me if i try to use it on my old laptop with its 1300x700 resolution) 3. Difficulty of editing stand alone files. It's just a pain in the arse editing files that aren't in the project, and that you don't want to be in the project For comparison, sublime text 2 launches in <1second on the same machine, and that includes restoring 100% of the previous working state, including unsaved changes to all files, even if the computer crashed and it wasn't closed down properly. edit: I almost forgot 4. It also takes 1-5seconds to close.

paperwork 13y ago
If you've used both, wouldn't you consider Eclipse and sublime text to be two very different tools? If you want to quickly edit some text, then Eclipse is overkil. If you are going to write programs for 8 hours a day, then Eclipse's benefits far out weigh its problems. To me, it is the difference between a car and a bike. The two serve different purposes. I don't mean to downplay problems with Eclipse. I remember that it was confusing when I first started using it. In the intervening years, I think the problem with eclipse is one of missed opportunities (or misplaced priorities).
- liquidise 13y ago
  This is a boat i bought into only in college. Once my professional career started, and i started viewing coding as an artisan craft, i realized that less tends to be more. I want an editor that i never have to wait for. Every IDE i have tried has time where i pause waiting for it to try and do something. Give me column editing, multiple cursors, and snippets and i will show you an editor i can code a system of any real size with.
  - philbarr 13y ago
    "column editing, multiple cursors, and snippets" It's more about smart refactoring, code completion, extensibility, project management, "open type hierarchy", "show usages", etc. You kind of need these things in big projects. Especially enterprise Java ones. "Of any real size" - I dispute you've written one that counts.
    - liquidise 13y ago
      Size in terms of software (and data) is always a perspective thing to be sure. I have worked on 2 separate millions of LoC codebases. Maybe its my ignorance, but i think there is more difference between a 10k Loc vs a 2mm Loc than 2mm vs 20mm. I might be wrong, I've never worked in something an order of magnitude larger than a few million.
  - ramchip 13y ago

Zigurd 13y ago

New users acquire a very bad impression of Eclipse because it is very badly behaved in terms of GUI conventions: It offers to do things that make no sense. For example, if I have an Android project selected, four out of the siz "Run as..." actions it offers make no sense. Run my Android app as a Java applet? How? Why? Doesn't it know an Android app can't do that? This could be very hard to fix. Does Eclipse have all the interfaces defined for correct behavior in all cases? how long would it take all the plugin developers to code the implementations for "Is this action sensible on this object?" and have that happen every time the selection changes?

imissmyjuno 13y ago
The keyboard shortcuts make no sense on OS X, either. Most of them are very Windows centric. Eg pressing anything on the F row or that uses Ctrl is not very native. I feel like Eclipse on OSX is an afterthought

fournm 13y ago

I don't know if I would quite go with loving Eclipse (working in an environment where workspaces are practically required instead of only closing/opening projects and having to redefine settings constantly is a pain) at this point, having never really used IntelliJ either, but... I will say as someone working with SWT right now that I'm not a fan.

LVB 13y ago

The number one reason I don't like it is performance. Things like typing and switching tabs shouldn't be slow. So I'm stuck choosing between having a bad experience or spending time in forums learning the latest .ini file tweaks and/or what features to disable to get normal editor performance. (This on a recent MBP.) Not sure how IntelliJ compares in this regard.

Taylorious 13y ago

I don't like Eclipse because it doesn't do the stuff that a basic IDE is suppose to do either at all or very well. Perhaps you have noticed that when you type in Intellij, it actually makes good suggestions and auto completes properly.

marshray 13y ago
I've tried to like Eclipse a few times over the years. What kills it for me is (paraphrasing a bug report ISTR) "We don't support rectangular selection and probably never will."
- werdnagreb 13y ago
  That's not true. Alt-Cmd+A toggles block selection on macs. Not sure what the keybinding is on windows.
  - marshray 13y ago
    Sounds like they added the feature then. Does paste of a block selection work correctly too?
    - robinst 13y ago
      It does, yes. A general tip to find features like this: Press Ctrl+3 (Cmd+3 on Mac OS X) or type in the "quick access" search bar in newer Eclipse versions. It shows the command and the shortcut. Also useful for toggling "Show Whitespace Characters" without needing to have the button in the toolbar, jumping to a preference page, etc.

smrtinsert 13y ago

That's just Textmate blah blah making its way into the mainstream. Can you explain the Intellij draw to me? I've spent the last two days off and on look at the community edition via installion and googling and I don't see the killer feature set that everyone is talking about. It looks like a JEdits older brother to me.

fusiongyro 13y ago

> I don't understand why so many people hate it. On a fresh computer, download and install Netbeans 7.3 and Eclipse 4.2. Then check out a Mavenized JSF project from and run it. Netbeans does Maven and Subversion out of the box, so I don't have to install any plugins. I point it at Tomcat, and it will build and deploy the app for me with one click of a button and zero configuration. I have never successfully gotten all the plugins and everything necessary to do this with Eclipse working. The member of our team that uses Eclipse deploys wars manually for this reason. IntelliJ, for what it's worth, also seems to do all of this out of the box (I used it for about a day, and concluded it wasn't enough better than Netbeans). The easiest way for me to describe Eclipse's problem and why I don't like it is to simply say it is worse. It's fat, slow to start up, slow to use, requires hours of complicated setup to get it to do what you want. Netbeans utterly wrecks it for every use case I have. Outside Java, I use Emacs mostly. I would actually love to get Eclipse working so I can use eclim, but the configuration story is just so horrible. Installing plugins is slow. Choose an update site? Wait five minutes for the UI to respond while it downloads a sitemap? Which of these five plugins is the Subversion plugin I need? What's Mylyn, and do I need integration with it or not? And so forth.