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Ask HN: Reasonable Java editor for heavily CLI-oriented UNIX types who hate bloat?
Hi everyone --
Let me give some background to properly contextualise this question:
I am the type of programmer that has been doing UNIX (generally Linux, also some commercial varieties) since 5th grade or so, and consequently am very command-line oriented in my habits. Did mostly C growing up, and a fair bit of Perl later.
So, obviously, when I was faced with the real-world need to do some Java, I approached it with my usual arsenal of half a dozen, uh, terminals and vi (VIM) sessions. Eventually I broke down and started using 'ant' for building instead of Makefiles, but apart from that, this approach has served me well.
I wouldn't mind a more Java-aware editor, though; something that can save me a little time on the tedious task of having to switch in and out of editor windows without having a holistic view of my source tree, as well as provide cross-referencing of symbols and API-specific autocomplete and perhaps online javadoc summaries built right into the editor. I spend a lot of time juggling all these editors and 15 tabs in my browser.
I've looked at Eclipse and NetBeans, but, they're just way too bloated and complicated. It would take me an enormous amount of time to figure out how to use them correctly and do things the Eclipse Way or NetBeans Way, and I don't think it'd be worth the flexibility I'd be giving up. Plus, they do far, far more internally than I really need, and I'd have to upgrade half my desktop machines just to stand a hope of realistically running them. They introduce gigantic piles of unnecessary metadata and internal abstractions I don't really want to deal with for my relatively simple, terse code (as much as Java can be).
On top of that, much of my development is server-side and, although I can mount the code tree with SSHFS or NFS or whatnot, local building and testing is essentially useless.
So, I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for a decent editor for someone in this predicament. I'm imagining something like an "IDE lite," or perhaps a really glorified take on UltraEdit (but not for Windows). I don't really know. Something that can get me the aspects of Eclipse that make editing Java code easier without all of the metadata, complicated build processes, user interface bulk, or sheer scope. Some say IntelliJ is the way to go here -- is it?
Thanks very much in advance, guys!
- mcav 18y agoEmacs? For command-line folk, either Emacs or vi would probably make the most sense long-term. They often have plugins to add functionality to make them more IDE-like. Learning curve's a bit tougher though, and might require more effort than it's worth. I still haven't completely switched over to Emacs yet, but it might pay off in the long run.
- arghnoname 18y agoI used emacs for everything and relatively recently got into the situation of having to do some java. http://jdee.sourceforge.net/ http://jdee.sourceforge.net/ It handles that too. I like having one editor that can follow me everywhere. Maybe Eclipse or the others work better for java or more out of the box or some such thing, but to me there's a huge benefit to having my programming editing behaviors consistent in a terminal, my desktop, PHP, perl, C, C++, java, etc. (with mode/language specific enhancements of course). If I grew up on Eclipse I'd probably feel the same way I suppose about it.
- whirlycott1 18y agoAnybody who writes java code in anything outside of Eclipse, NetBeans or IntelliJ is wasting their time. It doesn't take an enormous amount of time to learn how to use Eclipse. It probably takes 15 minutes of someone showing you the ropes. You need to stop thinking of the problem as "I need a text editor" because that's almost certainly not what you need. Eclipse in particular does nothing like what you claim ("unnecessary metadata and internal abstractions") except one or two files in the root of your project's directory tree. Upgrading your machines to support Eclipse means at worst spending $20 to buy 2Gb more memory, which doesn't seem like a lot to me. All of the requirements you mention (plus a lot more) are available today in Eclipse. And you don't want Eclipse because of a few poorly defended misconceptions that you are clinging to. Go back and give this a second look and get someone to show you the ropes with it over lunch. You will never look back. I have personally converted two people like you: die-hard emacs users who will never use an IDE because you tried them ten years ago and they sucked then. Neither of these two fellows would ever go back to that world now that they know what they're doing. You won't regret the few minutes it takes to learn basics.
- zenocon 18y agoI have to second this. If you are building anything more complex than a very simple project, and you are not using one of the three (Eclipse, Netbeans, Intellij) -- you are wasting a lot of your time. They are not hard to learn. The stuff you lose in a simple text editor: refactoring support, integration with version control, code-complete, debugging...etc. I'm simply going to guess based on your post that you also don't know much about the java open-source community. It is giant, diverse, and fantastic. Everything you need is out there. Before you write it yourself -- poke around on Google and no doubt you'll find something that already does what you need. I personally hate Ant builds. I think Ant can be done right -- but every place I've seen it used it just gets hacked, and the builds are a nightmare. This is why I prefer Maven b/c it constrains the build to a standard layout and there are a gazillion plugins to do everything you need.
- litewulf 18y agoThe only problem of course is that when your "more complex than a very simple project" hits the size where Eclipse just can't take it any more. A project I'm working on is pretty much at that scale, and random things basically stop working if I so much as stop looking at them. Its quite amazing. I've heard from coworkers that IntelliJ could handle it, but at the cost of agonizing slowness. So now I fire up eclipse (and reset all my project options and input from scratch) only when I need refactoring, and use emacs otherwise. Its not great, but at least I don't swear all day long.
- jm4 18y agoI love IntelliJ, but if you think Eclipse and NetBeans are bloated you'll almost certainly think the same of IntelliJ. Keep in mind, though, you do get a lot of features in return for all the "bloat"-- refactoring, intentions, inspections, better navigation and too many others to mention. Programming in Java is tedious and a good IDE makes things much less painful so maybe you'll want to reconsider. Unfortunately, there's not much middle ground between plain old text editors and full fledged IDE's so your options will be a little slim. You may want to check out JDEE for emacs. Setting it up is a little complicated, but it's probably going to be a little snappier than an IDE. You could also try jEdit. There are various Java development plugins so you can pick and choose the features you want. http://jdee.sourceforge.net/ http://jdee.sourceforge.net/ http://plugins.jedit.org/list.php?category=5 http://plugins.jedit.org/list.php?category=5
- dforbin 18y agoit seems really weird to me you find netbeans complicated. There's a reason java developers use bloated IDE's for anything more than quick edits. Spend a week in Netbeans and I bet you a lap dance you keep using it.
- dforbin 18y agoThat said, maybe Geany is what you want... It's lightweight and somewhere in between an IDE an editor. I quite like it.
- _sh 18y agoI'll second that. As a seasoned eclipse user I had another look at Netbeans recently. It seemed pretty much the same for me, and offered no compelling reason to switch. Until I poked around the profiler. Well, let me say there's no going back for me. The Netbeans profiler gives me confidence from knowing exactly what my application is doing, and exactly what that third-party library is costing me. The coverage, allocation stack traces, and jvm heap monitoring are fantastic. Seriously. Take a look: http://www.netbeans.org/kb/60/java/profiler-intro.html http://www.netbeans.org/kb/60/java/profiler-intro.html So yeah, I'll take a slice of that action and throw a pole dance in on that lap dance you bet. And it didn't even take me a week before I realised.
- whacked_new 18y agoIf you jumped from Eclipse to NetBeans, there wasn't any pain from the different plugin offerings? I don't enjoy installing two IDEs for the same language, but that's what I end up doing, unhappily.
- _sh 18y agoNo pain at all. I don't rely heavily on plugins though. The important bases were covered: refactoring, vcs integration, and the usual javadoc/outlining. Perhaps the only things I missed were getting a method's signature when you hover over it with the mouse, and the live variable value when you hover in debug mode. But these are so minor that I feel if they're not already there and I somehow haven't set them up, they'll be in the next release. But as I said, I get so much more confidence by being able to charge in to my code's runtime and poke around that it's worth it.
- mdoar 18y agoI get funny looks for using emacs for Java work, but it loads and runs fast on all the different platforms I work on. I have used and support people using Eclipse, and generally I like the ability to find definitions etc, but the refactoring rarely proves essential. As for autocompletion, if you can't hold the whole core language in your head, there's something wrong somewhere ;-)
- brown9 18y agoI think if you find that refactoring is "barely essential" then you are really missing out. I must use it's features about 20 times a day - from simple ones like "Rename" (seriously how would you do that easily in emacs, when the class is used in 15 places?), Extract Local Variable, Extract Method, etc.
- jrockway 18y agoI don't do multi-file changes in emacs, but they are pretty trivial with "perl -pi -e ...". You have a lot more flexibility with this method. I often create a new branch, spend a few commits getting the rename right, and then squash the commits and apply it to my real branch. (Sometimes I apply the changes to the index instead of applying it as a commit -- this way I can change other things in the same commit.) Anyway, the automated tools sort of fake this workflow, but sometimes the real thing is nicer.
- kevinpet 18y agoI've always had this nagging suspicion that I could become more productive, if only I truly learned how to use emacs. But this post has just finally convinced me that the only people who cling to emacs for large scale development are true believers who will never be swayed. The automated tools don't fake your workflow. A refactoring tool performs code modifications that it can prove make no change to the semantics of the code. You can sort of fake this, in a painful way using perl, but as you've just stated, your system is so unreliable that you create a branch to do something I may do a dozen times in an hour when I have some time to go back and clean up.
- _debug_ 18y agoablashov, I have to chime in with the others here and let you know that Eclipse does so many things for you, that in direct contradiction to what you assume, it is actually difficult to set up Emacs or Vi to do the same for you. One example is whole-workspace refactoring : Let's say you decide that a function (method) needs to take an extra parameter, a boolean, but actually, that is just to cover some corner cases, i.e., the argument will be false in most cases, but true for 5% of cases. But that method is used in 326 places. Guess what : changing method signature and refactoring ALL the code that uses that method is just a few actions in Eclipse. Eclipse --> Refactor --> Change method signature --> Add new parameter, boolean isCorner, default = false. You're done. It changes all 326 references to your method and rebuilds the project. Truth be told, Eclipse is a key reason for Java's popularity. It makes working a pleasure and helps you focus on the actual work, not on the mechanics of how-to-get-it-done.
- whirlycott1 18y agoI'll go further and say that Java is a horrible experience without Eclipse. One of my colleagues at work said today that (1) Java sucks without Eclipse and (2) Eclipse's wonderful features wouldn't be possible without all the things that makes the Java language suck.
- fhars 18y agoThat is Seibel's corrollary to Greenspun's Tenth Rule, no? Every sufficiently complex java program need a programmable IDE to make up for the half of Common Lisp not reimplemented in the program itself.
- whirlycott1 18y agoI had a conversation about refactoring with one of the giants of the Lisp world earlier this week about this, actually. The parts that make Lisp so powerful are the parts that also make it so hard to build reliable refactoring tools. Refactoring is something you need in any language. Otherwise, the implicit presumption is that you always get your software architecture 100% right the first time around.
- taxcollector 18y agoI have been meaning to check out eclim: http://eclim.sourceforge.net/ http://eclim.sourceforge.net/
- abalashov 18y agoWhoa! Holy crap!
- stuff4ben 18y agoI'd give JEdit a look. It's been a while since I've used it, but when I did several years ago, I appreciated how lightweight it was and it just worked. Nowadays I use Intellij on Ant and Maven based projects.
- rjurney 18y agoThe pain of Eclipse's bloat is real, but the speed with which you can learn new libraries through its features is worth it. I won't come within 10 feet of Eclipse for anything but Java, but its so great it makes Java fun because I can effortlessly zoom through definitions in multiple layers of libraries and figure out what is going on faster than in any other language/IDE. And I don't even like Java.
- ismarc31 18y agoIf you know emacs: http://jdee.sourceforge.net/ http://jdee.sourceforge.net/
- BonsaiKitt3n 18y agoToo bad Textmate is only for the mac, it rules the earth as java editor and it's lightweight like a gui text editor. I moved from eclipse to textmate over a year ago and I can't even open eclipse now it upsets me.
- papaf 18y agoI was in the same situation a while ago and ended up jumping to netbeans with the free and excellent jvi plugin. However, I feel your pain and when I recently started using scala on a hobby project I was really happy to be able to just use vim again -- partly because the netbeans support isn't so good for scala and partly because the language "feels" like it doesn't need an IDE.
- catch404 18y agoEclipse,emacs and maven works for me. I use the emacs for making quick changes and often end up working within it. Still couldn't go without having eclipse along side though.
- abalashov 18y agoAll right, you guys convinced me to give Eclipse another shot. So, I'm going to really try to get into it this time before I knock it.