Six Months with Eclipse

The last six months I have spent working exclusively with Eclipse on a OSGI based project. My editor of choice is IntelliJ IDEA but since everyone on the project are using Eclipse and it‘s OSGI features I figured I would give it a go without complaining (too much).

The project makes heavy use of OSGI components and since Eclipse is built with these components it should fit like a glove. OSGI component metadata, such as dependencies and published interfaces are defined through extensions to the standard jar-manifest file. Eclipse works well with these components and parses the manifests and updates the classpaths accordingly. All should be well but I miss IntelliJ everyday.

I am a keyboard shortcut fanatic and I like to be able to do everything without using the mouse. The first thing I did when I decided to go with Eclipse was to learn as many shortcuts as I could, print out a couple of quick reference guides and remap mappings I did not like and I am now fairly fluent in Eclipse. Eclipse has a lot of wondeful features and plugins (such as multi-clipboard) but IntelliJ excels. I can‘t say that everything is better in IntelliJ, but it is better at the little things that matter. It anticipates what I want to do and helps me do it when I want to. I behaves the same way no matter what kind of file I am editing. There are no surprises! If I think of something and try it out it usually works the first time.

To illustrate my point I‘ll give a few examples: Cut text (Control-X): Cuts the selected text into the buffer, but if no text is selected it works with the current line.

Context-Selection (Control-W) inside a string: Press once: a word delimited by non alphanums is selected, again: the full string without quotes, again: the full string including quotes, again: all parameters of the enclosing method call, again: the enclosing method call excluding semi-colon, again: the enclosing method call including semi-colon, again: the full line, again: all lines in the block, again: the enclosing block… And it works the same way inside XML, Javascript, JSP etc. If you try this in Eclipse there is no telling what will happen depending on file and context.

Go to class (Control-N), Go to file (Control-Shift-N) When you, while typing the search criteria, remember that it is not a class but an XML file you want to look up you just press Control-Shift-N and IDEA remembers what you typed in and starts looking for a file corresponding to what you typed.

These are just few little things that make a big difference. There are hundreds!

Eclipse is free! It is Open Source! It has loads of usable and cool plugins! I want to want to use it, but I don‘t since it is not good enough.