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Comment by alanfranzoni | Hacker News Reader

Imho Eclipse has never been a good ide. Its confusing user experience never appealed me. But then, it was free and had certain features and was quite extensible.

Then Netbeans began improving quickly, IDEA had a free edition and Jetbrains released many good IDEs for other languages as well.

Game over.

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I've always despised Eclipse. It was always a PITA and was a resource hog. It turned me off of all IDE's for years until I came back and saw the light with IDEA & friends.

Eclipse set the bar in terms of having an utterly vast list of features and wild west bazaar of plugins. It was like market research for the more sophisticated vendors. IntelliJ has the 30% of features users actually wanted with a much tighter implementation.

My impression is quite different: IntelliJ has comparable set of features, but the difference is that in IntelliJ those features actually work without annoying user. this started with a simple but brilliant idea JetBrains developers had: "disk space is dirt cheap, let's use 1-2 GB of it to store index, so that autocompletion could work lightining fast". Also, because it was initially developed by single company and single team of developers IDEA code (both core and plugins) is much more consistent in terms of quality than Eclipse's counterparts.

I am a long time happy user of IDEA but they seem to be always screwing up index these days. There has been version when the responsiveness of autocomplete has plummet. It has gone faster in places and slower in others. I think in general the worst case performance (people remember the annoyances more) has often regressed between releases too much. It seems every software out there is getting more features but the produces are getting sloppy and bug prone.

I agree completely. While Eclipse had a lot of plugins, it was often difficult to make them work together; so I was stuck with multiple Eclipse or eclipse customizations with a different set of plugins for each one.

IDEA has probably less features, and third party plugins don't necessarily work well together; but you can see the idea of the "ide as a whole" behind Jetbrains products.

I disagree. Eclipse used to be a capable IDE, even if some UI choices were dubious (but everyone has opinions about interface design, don't they?)

It was free & open source, and had superb autocompletion and refactoring, and a decent debugger. What else could you ask of a Java IDE?

Unfortunately, it seems to me Eclipse has become more unusable, slow and confusing with each iteration. But it didn't start that way. I seem to remember one major version which completely changed the UI, and at the same time the team disabled most UI tests, and the justification was "most tests broke with the latest change, and we don't have enough resources to fix them". And it showed...

sorry, but I find the IDEA ui a lot more confusing than eclipse. Must be long time exposure...

Agree,

what about settings and configuration... export your eclipse settings from one workstation to another can be half day of work.

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