Let’s face the truth: The Eclipse IDE is not the first choice for developers. Especially in the field of Java and Web Development, other IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA, VS Code or Gitpod are attracting most new users. Even worse, more and more Eclipse users move away.
Being an Eclipse user for decades meanwhile I have learned to be productive with the Eclipse IDE, and still like it. But in the recent past, my projects required me to use other IDEs as well. And yes, the grass is greener on the other side.
So what makes those IDEs more attractive? Why do some developers hate Eclipse IDE and love others? Where does the Eclipse IDE need to improve and invest to be competitive in the future? Let’s find some answers by showing where the Eclipse Platform can learn from.
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A short selection of what's wrong with Eclipse IDE
Submitted by Erik Brangs on Thu, 2022-09-29 13:56
I still use Eclipse and I still like it. Having written that, I will spend the rest of the comment complaining about the shortcomings of the Eclipse IDE and its ecosystem.
I loathe the "user experience" of the install software dialog (Help -> Install New Software ...). It has lots of annoying "features". For example, it prevents you from doing anything else (e.g. when it cannot find a solution and insists on spending minutes trying to find an alternative solution while ignoring any cancel attemps). And then there's options like "Contact all update sites during install to find required software" which sounds sensible but mostly doesn't help when you've really got a problem. Additionally, it feels like the option makes the update checks take forever when you've got a few update sites no matter how fast your connection is. And there's the error messages when an installation or update attempt fails: "Can't install X because of a conflicting dependency ". The error message is limited to 4 lines shown at once and anything of the sort is more like 20-40 lines long. The recent changes to HTTPS verification for update sites also didn't help. They produced lots of annoying popups for update sites that don't support HTTPS.
There's also lots of JDT bugs that don't get fixed because JDT doesn't have enough developers.
And then there's annoyances like not being able to stop JUnit tests.
And then there's everything that doesn't belong to Eclipse foundation projects but that you can't do without. For example, there's the Red Hat JBoss Tools which you need if want to develop on Wildfly from within Eclipse. The JBoss Tools aren't in the Simultaneous Release and they seem to be tightly coupled to the Eclipse version. So every time there's a new Eclipse release, you can look forward to finding out which of the following cases is true:
- you can't update your Eclipse until JBoss Tools updates to latest Eclipse release because of some strange dependency conflict that you can't make sense of within the install new software dialog. For example, this is the case for me for 2022-09. So I'll have to wait until October-ish or November-ish until JBoss Tools puts out a new release.
- you can update your Eclipse but JBoss Tools violated the API guidelines and depended on some internals. Inevitably the internals changed which means something broke. I had that last year. In that case, it lead to popups about being unable to find an internal class which was removed.
- you're in luck and everything's fine
Speaking of plugins, they often provide you with the opportunity to go on a hunt of "What do I need to (de-)install to make this problem go away?" which allows you to fully experience the quality of the "Install new Software" dialog. For example, a recent version of PyDev broke double-click in the Java EE perspective.
Re: A short selection of what's wrong with Eclipse IDE
Submitted by Erik Brangs on Mon, 2022-10-03 10:33
Apparently cancel attempts are no longer ignored in the "Install New Software" dialog in Eclipse 2022-09.
Re: A short selection of what's wrong with Eclipse IDE
Submitted by Karsten Thoms on Mon, 2022-10-17 18:40
Thanks Erik for your comment. Apologies that I missed to see it before now.
I can feel with you. I have been and still am an Eclipse user for so many years. I also still like it and think that it has its sweet spots. I also see some progress on adding some useful features, more stability and better resource consumption.
The annoying experience with installations and upgrades I am aware of. Since I have some more understanding in how the platform works internally I can understand why some things are like they are, e.g. the tight integration of some plugins with a specific Platform / JDT version.
My main concerns are in the direction of user experience, and what you are describing is part of that. I believe that is important for the adoption of new users to lower the bar of getting started as much as possible (e.g. like the "features" of the software installation, or import projects from VCS). And it would be time for some facelifting. The UI is just not attractive.
Resources are rare, and of course the few available developers have to choose wisely where they invest their valuable time. And most of them are developers like us and not interaction/UI design experts.
I hope the community can gain more power to put some focus on the overall experience and especially for users that start working with Eclipse.
And hopefully I can contribute a tiny bit by sharing some pain points and showing where others do better. It is not much time during this talk, I would like to share thoughts in detail at EclipseCon maybe in the evenings at EC2022. Maybe we meet there?
Re: Re: A short selection of what's wrong with Eclipse IDE
Submitted by Erik Brangs on Sat, 2022-10-22 12:31
Thank you for your reply. I won't be attending EC2022.
Off the top of my head, the most positive points in the UX for me are the workspace concept, the instant feedback via incremental compilation for Java and the full-text search that was contributed by the Spring folks ("Quick Search").
I suppose the UX problems are also a symptom of the developer shortage. I'm not sure how to fix that. The interesting parts of IntelliJ (e.g. web development) are commercial and that seems to be enough to fund their product development.
Stop complaining start contributing!
Submitted by Christoph Laeubrich on Sat, 2022-10-29 11:17
Its a bit sad that people seem better spend times in complaining than start to contribute (neither time nor money). So start giving feedback or even help improving things, how should the few devlopers knwo what to improve if not getting feedback at all? Aslo there is no need to "wait" for the next release, try out the latest ibuilds, give feedback fast and then there will be no surprise after the release.... bug JBoss to join the simrell or even pay them for that, help with testing their tools against ibuilds, there are always a way to change.
Why complaining that "Eclipse must do something" if you can start right now or someone else in your company! Or hire a person to do so? Companies hire people for everything but improving the tools their devlopers using everyday seem often out of scope.
As a starting point I opened the follwoing issues so we hopefully get improvements in the area of maven connector / mojo support:
Re: Stop complaining start contributing!
Submitted by Christoph Laeubrich on Sun, 2022-10-30 05:05
I created an issue at EGit as well to improve the user experience when importing projects from git:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=580959