> Then there is the beast called Eclipse. It certainly seems like it should be able to do everything in the world... Yet it is buggy, its plugin architecture is a conflicting mess, and its performance is so abysmal...
I have used Eclipse for many years with multiple languages, and none of this is quite true. There is a bit of a learning curve, where you have to learn not to do some things that break it. :) But that just takes a few hours, and a bit of patience - after that you have many months of happy coding, where it just works...
I used Eclipse daily for about two years, along with an internal C code plugin. I'm not sure which I can attribute to Eclipse and which I can attribute to the plugin, but my Eclipse workspaces were frequently getting randomly corrupted, global search-and-replace was not trustworthy, and for a while it was running so unstable overall that there were times I could launch Eclipse, load my workspace, and within a few minutes of just sitting there it would crash. This was running on Windows XP.
So I tried Eclipse at home on my Mac. I saw that it came with a utility for auto-packaging Java programs into OS X bundles. I made a simple Java Swing "Hello World" program and tried the bundle utility. It didn't work. I tried a few more times, and it never worked, but in fact got progressively worse in its output. Uninstall.
Some months later I thought I'd try Eclipse on the Mac again; surely it had improved. So I downloaded it again, created a new project, clicked through to add a new source code file and I got an error, that it could not create a new file.
I'm guessing that my experiences must be abnormal, since Eclipse is so hugely popular, but I now avoid it whenever I possibly can.
Yes, your experiences are extremely abnormal. I've used Eclipse extensively (I think since 2002 or so) and apart from the very early days I have never had a corrupted workspace, I have never ever had a problem with inconsistent search results and I can't remember an occurrence of it crashing (unless you count an out of memory, which is just from bad config).
Those are pretty strange. I am using it on a Mac right now, with no serious problems.
I'm not sure about the bundle creator, I never used that, but not being able to create a new file seems like some random little issue that's most likely fixable.
Since we're talking anecdotes, I've never ever had any of these problems. I've used SVN/Git plugins, Android's plugins, etc on every operating system that Eclipse supports and I've never ever had a problem.
I used eclipse to code java every day for 5 years. I used it on windows, linux and OS X. During that time I upgraded computers a few times. Each time I upgraded I was optimistic that my shiny new machine would make eclipse run at a tolerable speed. Having a language that was succinct enough to not need a beast like eclipse was one of the main reasons I originally switched to ruby. Using something simple like textmate sometimes means I have to go the long way round when I want to perform a refactor but at least I know when it's going to be slow. With eclipse you can do something as simple as open a file and have to endure 30 seconds of freeze. When you need to get something done fast that's painful not to say stressful!
Either you have a v slow machine or you had some major configuration issues with Eclipse or other services running on that machine. Even on a 1.4GHz Core 2 machine on a large java project, source files open < 1 sec.
So you seem to be Eclipse-proficient. Please, tell me: How do i upgrade Eclipse (3.5 to 3.6) without reinstalling the whole thing and all plugins manually one by one? Why are plugins downloaded with 20KB/s, where apt-get gets 1MB/s?
Is there some serious reason you need to upgrade? If so, then I think you can just unzip a fresh install and copy over the plugins you want (as .jar files) into the new directory structure. Apparently there are more ways to do this, though I didn't try: http://www.venukb.com/2006/08/20/install-eclipse-plugins-the...
I have used Eclipse for many years with multiple languages, and none of this is quite true. There is a bit of a learning curve, where you have to learn not to do some things that break it. :) But that just takes a few hours, and a bit of patience - after that you have many months of happy coding, where it just works...