All that said, Eclipse JDT remained a solid IDE for pure Java development and the go-to choice for students and open source projects looking for a free IDE.
This was killed by the launch of Intellij Community Edition.
Not in my experience. The majority of students at my university still seems to be using Eclipse.
I would suspect this is only because they don't know any better. There is very little defendable reason for suffering with Eclipse for basic Java work when IntelliJ is free.
Yea I use Eclipse exactly like a text editor that has project management features, refactoring support, formatting, automated imports and class completion, dependency management, compiling and packaging.
That is I and most Eclipse users use Eclipse as an IDE. Not as vim/emacs.
Because Eclipse is not an advanced text editor and more of a weird platform experiment. Every time I have to leave emacs(or vi) for a defaulted Eclipse I get wrist pain (how ironic).
Until something can do the auto importing that Eclipse can do nothing will beat it.
On a side not I've also disliked IntelliJ's code quality defaults. Back when I tried it, it said that defining List objects without using type definitions for it's generic was ok.
List test = new ArrayList<String>();
Was not marked as a warning even though you should be defining that in every location possible, imo, to clarify what's going on. There were other things but it was a long time ago and I won't remember them unless I download it and try it again.
Although JetBrains can't be beat for CLion, PHPStorm, soon Rider, and PyCharm.
I liked JBuilder back in the day and today I use STS (based on Eclipse) because as much as I tried to like IntelliJ, I really don't understand what's going on.
Over about 20 years of Java I've personally had to deal with JBuilder, Visual J++, Eclipse, IntelliJ and NetBeans and probably some I've forgotten. I don't understand where all the Eclipse hate comes from - it's fast, responsive, extensible and works well. Looks elegant to me too, where is that vitriol coming from in the article?
I've certainly seen configurations of Eclipse that are abysmal (Rational Application Developer) and/or frameworks that make things unbearable (moreso in the past). But it's always felt more usable and productive than anything else I've tried. I don't understand the passion I see from IntelliJ users either... it's about as ugly and unintuitive to me as NetBeans was. Perhaps it's just what you're used to.
One positive people tend to raise in support of IntelliJ IDEA is it's refactoring support... I've honestly found Eclipse's to be better. Normally I wouldn't defend anything so heavily backed by IBM, but objectively it's far better than anything else as far as I've found.
It may be because the fact that Eclipse has cluttered user interface which looks like something developed in the 90s, despite we have 2016 now. Maybe because it has myriads of plugins that are not well maintained, documented, or just does not work. Maybe because auto-completion is slow and does not display most probable candidates. It might also be that dark theme is pain in the eyes. I don't know, really...
Seriously though, I believe Eclipse should hire good UI designer to produce modern, fast and good looking interface. Measure what people use, how they use it, for what reason - and then improve it. I got a feeling that they forgot (and it happened very early in the project life time) about the most important part of every project - end user.
Probably not many. Refactoring support in IDEs for static languages is a huge time saver. Reference management and simplicity of compiling are other benefits. Also IntelliJ has a vim mode.
Visual Studio Code uses OmniSharp as middleware for the C# extension for instance to check code, find usages, and lookup types. The "rename symbol" works fine so far. I guess, but am not sure, they use the language server protocol [1] to communicate with OmniSharp.
A few months ago I stumbled upon a Java language server [2] which utilizes Eclipse JDT. Maybe if the Java language server supports refactoring and Vim support the language server protocol, we could have refactoring of Java code in Vim on par with Eclipse.
