I remember back in the late 90s I had bought some Borland JBuilder IDE (shrinkwrap, at software store of course), so when Eclipse came around it was awesome.
And don't forget how ugly those Swing-based IDEs were because of the ugly, non-cleartype fonts in IDEs like Intellij. Eclipse used SWT which used native widgets if possible.
Eclipse had a plugin for just about everything, but the plugin-hell got to the point that I ended up having many installations of eclipse because the plugins for various languages, frameworks wouldn't play nicely with each other.
But one thing that always drove me crazy about Eclipse that never got fixed was the intellisense/code completion. They could never get it work without pushing some key combination instead of being able to autocomplete on the fly like Intellij, Visual Studio. So you either had to wait to get to the dot to some code completion or manually press ctrl-space which drove me crazy. I read that there was some strange architectural issues deep in the bowels of Eclipse that prevented anybody from fixing that, but who knows.
By the time Eclipse 4 came around I didn't really have a need for it anymore, but remember that they were pushing that web-based IDE and didn't think that spending limited resources for that was a very good idea.
But I'm happy that Eclipse was out there and thanks to all the devs that made it happen.
On a side note, is Netbeans much of a thing anymore? I'm guessing after the Oracle takeover, it fell to the wayside, but it was probably on the downslope even before then. That was a snappy little IDE though.
And don't forget how ugly those Swing-based IDEs were because of the ugly, non-cleartype fonts in IDEs like Intellij. Eclipse used SWT which used native widgets if possible.
Eclipse had a plugin for just about everything, but the plugin-hell got to the point that I ended up having many installations of eclipse because the plugins for various languages, frameworks wouldn't play nicely with each other.
But one thing that always drove me crazy about Eclipse that never got fixed was the intellisense/code completion. They could never get it work without pushing some key combination instead of being able to autocomplete on the fly like Intellij, Visual Studio. So you either had to wait to get to the dot to some code completion or manually press ctrl-space which drove me crazy. I read that there was some strange architectural issues deep in the bowels of Eclipse that prevented anybody from fixing that, but who knows.
By the time Eclipse 4 came around I didn't really have a need for it anymore, but remember that they were pushing that web-based IDE and didn't think that spending limited resources for that was a very good idea.
But I'm happy that Eclipse was out there and thanks to all the devs that made it happen.
On a side note, is Netbeans much of a thing anymore? I'm guessing after the Oracle takeover, it fell to the wayside, but it was probably on the downslope even before then. That was a snappy little IDE though.