The "workspaces" feature is at least partly broken, and there are bugs open which have been open for years, if not decades, suggesting or asking for improvements. But despite the weight of evidence that people want this improved, the Eclipse developers are generally more interested in adding the latest "gee whiz" features than dealing with "bread and butter" issues.
And, sadly, the UX aspect isn't even the biggest problem with Eclipse (all "IMO" of course). Performance, especially memory usage is a huge issue (especially on 64 bit systems) and the updater/plugin mechanism is too damn unreliable. If you use more than 2 or 3 plugins, it's almost inevitable that you will, at some point, try to update something and get the infamous "could not complete operation" message when adding a new plugin, or updating an existing one. Now, that's not really the problem... the problem is that eclipse just vomits a page and a half of error messages and opaque version numbers and strings at you, when this happens... instead of giving useful help on how to resolve the situation.
All of that said, I still use (and, in many ways like) Eclipse, but it is very frustrating to see these same problems drag on for years and years.
About updater/plugin mechanism in eclipse I just want to point out that is actually being fixed/improved greatly in upcoming Eclipse 4.3 (Kepler).
Eclipse update mechanism (called p2) actually at is core is very powerful and can actually find out/remedy the installation/update but it was just never exposed in the UI used by Eclipse IDE's.
Simply explained before Kepler p2 would just try and do exactly what you told it to "install these 2 plugins" and if its dependencies somehow conflicted it would give up ("could not complete operation").
In Kepler if this situation occurs p2 will try remedy the situation and try find out which plugins would need to be updated or maybe even downgraded to make it possible for you to install your plugins.
Thus we are some that actually care and do what we can to improve it - this feature got in with help from @prapicault
And for full disclosure i'm @maxandersen from the conversation OP linked to and lead of JBoss Developer Studio.
Kepler is also on track to fix the rest of the 4x perf bugs right? I dled M7 yesterday and noticed it still flashes full screen on Win764 when I move view groups around in a perspective.
I still love eclipse. I'm not ashamed to admit it. I've helped people sell businesses and go public with this damn platform creating millions in revenue along the way. When it's powering my livelihood and my employers happiness, I feel like something went right somewhere.
It's a shame the UX in 4.2 has been such a thing to focus on.
That's great news, thanks for sharing! The plugin situation has honestly been one of my biggest gripes with Eclipse for some time. Once I get to a reasonably stable configuration that more or less works, I'm always very reluctant to change anything else, for fear of hosing my entire install and having to start over from scratch. That really detracts from the overall experience. :-)
That's certainly welcome news. Are there going to be any improvements to the performance of the incremental search when "All Available Sites" is selected? There is simply no reason why Eclipse should take 30+ seconds at 100% cpu on a i7-2600K to return a list of packages that match a substring.
It's a sad reality that FOSS is about the developers scratching their own itches, and not really about user level polish. That's what paid businesses are for. User bugs are hard and not sexy and probably not fun to developers, which is why they are punted to the bottom.
I guess it all depends on what factors you want to optimize for, like fun or success.
I wouldn't conflate the institutional problems plaguing Eclipse with a strict FOSS/paid business dichotomy here, especially because Eclipse was started at IBM, and continues to be funded and led by IBM/Oracle, etc.
It's tempting to make these sorts of claims because a mild level of user hostility plagues most FOSS gui apps that we encounter, but I think it's more useful to think instead of how difficult it apparently is for organizations to make effective UX design decisions.
It's equally likely that a "horrifyingly designed UI" (much like Eclipse) came out of an Enterprise Software shop.
None of the incentives are aligned toward optimizing user experience (i.e. rarely do the people who use the software the most have any say in how it gets built). And, because the way responsibilities are divided (i.e. one team per set of functionality, I imagine), no one in the leadership structure is empowered to make big changes that affect everyone; and so you're left with small incremental improvements and shitty error messages.
When it was VisualAge, it seemed like a pretty good UI back in the day, and compared favorably to the Borland and Microsoft products in use then. So I think maybe IBM can be let off the hook some.
Certainly. When Eclipse arrived, it was better than its alternatives, and it has not become strictly worse. More complicated maybe. But it is still a good IDE, it is just that IDEA is better, and expectations have changed.
I thought that IBM was behind Eclipse, hence the name being a jab at Sun (who created Java, and 'owned' it at the time). That seems more than just a bunch of random people 'scratching an itch.'
I have used it on and off since the early days, and as hardware got faster, Eclipse... somehow has not. Its responsiveness on my 2011 Macbook Air SSD is truly shocking from the point of view of both UX and productivity.
I use it every day at the moment, and this is the only thing that I am constantly noticing.
The plugin compatibility thing can be a massive pain if you get bit by it too, of course, but doing plugins right is quite hard I think, and Eclipse isn't the only one failing there.
Are all HN Eclipse users on Macs? There seems like there's a universe of difference between the common experience and what I've had with the decade or so on the platform.
For me on Windows, crashing is extremely rare. I've used it on just about every project I've worked on to great benefit. I typically run JavaEE config, and then add in m2, FindBugs, Subclipse, ADT, and sometimes Aptana when I want to check on it.
I never notice memory because I never run out of memory. Where configs is everyone using that memory is such an issue?
Not me. I run it on Linux. Fedora Linux on my personal laptop, and Ubuntu on my $DAYJOB machine.
I never notice memory because I never run out of memory. Where configs is everyone using that memory is such an issue?
It's not so much about running out of memory, as just the fact that Eclipse consumes a lot of memory, which means it doesn't play nice with other apps. I have 4GB of RAM in my $DAYJOB machine, running 64bit Ubuntu, and after I load Eclipse 4.2 with a few projects open, it's not uncommon to find the resident image size sitting at over 1GB. So, that wouldn't be a problem in isolation, but now add in an instance of JBoss running, PostgreSQL, a few browser windows with a bunch of tabs open, a PgAdminIII window, a couple of Gnome Terminal windows, etc. and pretty soon the hard-drive is just thrashing like crazy, essentially freezing the entire system, for minutes at a time. To be fair, everything is contributing to that, but Eclipse is one of the main culprits.
pretty soon the hard-drive is just thrashing like crazy, essentially freezing the entire system, for minutes at a time
As a side note, this is why I never configure swap space in a server. If a server starts swapping, it's a fail. It should have enough RAM to do the tasks it's supposed to do, without ever running out of RAM. When it runs out of RAM, either the software has to be reconfigured to work within the available RAM, or the RAM has to be increased; or some tasks should be allocated to other servers.
> I have 4GB of RAM in my $DAYJOB machine, running 64bit Ubuntu, and after I load Eclipse 4.2 with a few projects open
I think the main problem is that having 4GB for a workstation is really low (specially for today's standards). Specially reading all the stuff that you put in.
I can imagine your day-to-day computer work should be unbearable. Are you based in the USA? I know that over there you can get 8GB for about $60, which for a company that is paying you $3000 monthly is peanuts.
Oh, I already have the 2nd 4GB chip in my possession, I've just been to busy to install it. And maybe this is one place where my age is showing, but... 4 freaking GB of RAM, IMO, ought to be enough, not, as they say "for anybody", but enough to run an IDE, one app server instance, a couple of browser windows and a handful of smaller tools.
Then again, part of it is being on a laptop that doesn't have an SSD which makes swap painfully slow. But still, Eclipse takes too much freaking RAM for what it does, IMO.
All of that said, the next laptop I buy for myself is going to have an SSD and as much RAM as I can possibly afford.
I'm not a eclipse user, but here's a comparison. On my workstation, visual studio 2010 regularly consumes over 1.5GB RAM. It's painful as hell, especially as I'm sometimes working on multiple solutions at once.
Familiarity, lack of pain, not convinced the alternatives are sufficiently better to justify the learning curve, etc.
In short, Eclipse mostly works for what I do, and while it frustrates me at times, there isn't enough pain there to motivate me to throw away the investment I've made in learning to use, configure, and customize Eclipse - for an alternative which may or may not even be better. Also, Intellij didn't always have the Open Source version, and I generally avoid using any software that isn't F/OSS. So for the longest time, my only real options for a Java based IDE were Eclipse or Netbeans. I played with Netbeans a little here and there, but never found it compelling. shrug
There are lots of things Eclipse does better than IntelliJ (and the other way too of course). It's mostly little things here or there (Quick Fix for example, SVN integration seems a lot better too). I sit around IntelliJ guys so I tend to compare whenever something annoys me in Eclipse or when doing pair programming.
And, sadly, the UX aspect isn't even the biggest problem with Eclipse (all "IMO" of course). Performance, especially memory usage is a huge issue (especially on 64 bit systems) and the updater/plugin mechanism is too damn unreliable. If you use more than 2 or 3 plugins, it's almost inevitable that you will, at some point, try to update something and get the infamous "could not complete operation" message when adding a new plugin, or updating an existing one. Now, that's not really the problem... the problem is that eclipse just vomits a page and a half of error messages and opaque version numbers and strings at you, when this happens... instead of giving useful help on how to resolve the situation.
All of that said, I still use (and, in many ways like) Eclipse, but it is very frustrating to see these same problems drag on for years and years.