When I posted to reddit a link to my recent Eclipse Groovy script to remove the 'busy' image from the WebBrowser Editor post, the thread what I hoped would happen would be one around the idea of 'fixing in real time minor (but-very-annoying) issues that exist in the IDEs that we use everyday'
After all, there are very few IDE environments that allow that kind of real-time programatic access to the current running IDE (which allows the creation of new 'plugin-like functionality' without needing to run an 'IDE dev instance' on the background).
For reference, the reason why I took the time to develop the Eclispe Grovy REPL Scripting Environment, was because I did the same on this VisualStudio C# REPL extension, and knew how powerful (and useful) it was to have the ability to 'script the IDE'
Back to the reddit there, in a probably predictable way, the only comment I got on that thread:
.. was to stop using such 'crappy IDE':
Unfortunately this is actually a common theme on the Eclipse world, where there is a 'group think view' that eclipse sucks, its bloated and not really innovating.
Well, I hope that you can see by the number of blog posts that I've written so far (31 at the moment), that I don't share this view.
And here was my answer
I'm committed to make Eclipse a great IDE, and I hope that my ideas, plugins, contributions and blog posts help Eclipse to become the best IDE out there (at least for Java and Javascript development)
But it is going to be an uphill battle since the mood out there is very anti-eclipse. Here are a couple posts that turn up on google (indexed by date):
- [Oct 2013 ] Battle of the Java IDEs: Eclipse vs. NetBeans vs. Intellij IDEA
- [Sep 2013 ] Why we dropped Eclipse in favour of IntelliJ (serverside thread)
- [Sep 2013 ] Why we dropped Eclipse in favour of IntelliJ (plumbr blog)
- [Aug 2013] Is IntelliJ IDEA Community any good? I'm sick of Eclipse crashing
- [Jul 2013 ] Is intellij better than netbeans?
- [May 2013] Eclipse vs. IntelliJ: a simple matter of little things (the link is broken, and I think the author wanted to point to this Android development: Choose right IDE presentation)
- [Mar 2013] Netbeans or Eclipse? Which do you use? (with lots of 'use IntelliJ' comments)
- [Mar 2013] Why IDEA is better than Eclipse
- [2013 ] How is IntelliJ better than Eclipse?
- [2013 ] Things possible in IntelliJ that aren't possible in Eclipse?
- [Jan 2012 ] Intellij vs. Eclipse
- [Feb 2007 ] Is it me or is eclipse a piece of shit
In trying to find a balanced view (ie. posts with comments from the people who love Eclipse), I really struggled:
The only positive note that I could find was from Jan 2013 where in the Which IDE do you prefer, Netbeans, Eclipse or IntelliJ? Eclipse had the majority of votes.
I'm sure there is a large number of happy Eclipse users out there (I'm one of them), but as you can see by the links above, there is an 'internet group-think' mode at the moment in favour of IntelliJ.
Update: if you want to add your views on this question, but prefer to use reddit, here is the thread about this post
