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Comment by eta_carinae | Hacker News Reader

> A few developers I've known have made the case that they just don't see text editing speed as the bottleneck in their day-to-day work.

Right, it's only a bottleneck if you use the wrong tool for the job. As much as I love vi for text editing, it is the wrong tool for HTML editing and for a growing number of other file types for which more specialized editors exist (e.g. Eclipse for Java).

I know that vi experts think they are very fast with vi but they are wrong: if you are using vi for anything but simple text files, you are not being as productive as you could be and you should really consider being more mentally flexible and use the right tool for the job instead of vi for every job.

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Eclipse seems to be a program that consumes all available memory to turn its windows grey when you type into it. I'm not sure how you think it's suitable for Java programming.

(More seriously: Eclipse is not suited for text editing, but it is suited for dragging and dropping getters and setters. If that's what Java programming is to you, you can save a lot of time with Eclipse.)

Eclipse is bloated, granted, but if you think its strong point is "dragging and dropping getters and setters" then you haven't seriously tried it. I used to think IDEs didn't matter much for basic code editing, but had to change my opinion after using Eclipse and IntelliJ (my preference) for a while. Higher-level (as in -- with knowledge of the programming language) editing and refactoring can make a big difference to your editing experience. Tasks that were tedious become trivial and part of the normal flow. You actually find yourself writing code in a different way once you understand how easily you can manipulate blocks of code (rather than just blocks of text).

I've been stuck doing Java lately (grumble grumble). I love Vim, but occasionally, I just want an IDE to dull the Java boilerplate pain. I've been copy pasting sample snippets in to IntelliJ, auto-adding all the import statements, and then going back to do my main coding in Vim.

I have to close IntelliJ quickly, however, lest the Swing fonts BURN OUT MY RETNAS on my Linux box. How can anybody get any work done with font rendering that bad?!

Jetbrains are changing their platform to use native font rendering.

From their blog: "default look and feel on Linux changed from GTK+ to Alloy IDEA – it uses system fonts and has a much better overall quality (worth to try for current users too)"

I am unable to find that.

When will it be available?

Do you have a link?

http://blog.jetbrains.com/webide/2012/10/phpstorm-webstorm-5...

You can get vi keybinding plugins for IntelliJ and Eclipse (and netbeans). They make it a little better.

> Eclipse seems to be a program that consumes all available memory to turn its windows grey when you type into it. I'm not sure how you think it's suitable for Java programming.

Considering that about half of the Java community uses it and is quite happy with it, did it occur to you that maybe, your experience with it was not representative?

Jrockaway works at Google, where their Java workspaces are roughly equal in total LOC to all Ruby in production everywhere.

That's about right. It's true that my experience with Java is not representative, but I'm still unclear what would happen if I did manage to get Eclipse working correctly. Emacs can organize imports, complete symbols, jump to definitions, and things like that. It can't refactor as intelligently as I imagine Eclipse can, but the one time I've needed to do a really big refactor I just did it manually with a Perl one-liner (I should have written a full script, in retrospect) and cleaned up the handful of mistakes when reviewing the diffs.

(That's generally how I feel about Eclipse. It will spend several hours analyzing your source code so it can do a perfect variable rename. But you can get 99.99% of the way there with "perl -pi -ne 's/int foo/int bar/g'" and fix the two cases it broke in seconds. I'd rather not write that and not do the fixup, but with so much cognitive load to make that automatic, it just isn't worth it. Why does refactoring Java require a complicated GUI application with more settings than the Space Shuttle?)

The one feature I really want is something that detects what problem I'm trying to solve and shows me the documentation for libraries that can help.

But really, I wish someone would write an article like "why I switched from vim to Eclipse", but I only ever see ones where the author does the opposite.

> But really, I wish someone would write an article like "why I switched from vim to Eclipse", but I only ever see ones where the author does the opposite.

You haven't looked very hard, most Eclipse users today came from emacs or vi. And are you seriously arguing that a search/replace is more effective than a refactoring performed automatically with guaranteed correctness?

You are being unreasonably and inexplicable biased against Eclipse (and IDE's in general), it's pretty baffling.

I think you're unreasonably interpreting this as an attack. Articles of the form "I switched to Vim/Emacs" show up reasonably regularly here and on programming related subreddits. I can't recall seeing a similar article touting the benefits of switching to Eclipse.

Similarly, a cursory google search of 'switched "from vim to eclipse"' doesn't reveal any articles of this form.

If you can point me to such an article, or write one, I'd be interested, but I think you have to agree that articles of the form IDE->vim/emacs are much more common than the reverse.

I'm not being biased against Eclipse, I'm just wondering if the productivity loss its crashing and lack of editing functionality inflict is less than the productivity gain from being 100% accurate at renaming variables.

Most people I know learned Eclipse/Visual Studio first.

Moving a method so it can be shared, and automatically updating the access modifier

Proportional font support for code and javadoc, to make better use of screen pixels.

Javadoc on mouse over

When debugging step by step, variable inspection on mouseover at source code point.

Most popular plugin features are well packaged for no hassle installation.

These are few of my favorite things that I can't do in emacs/vim...

I use Eclipse (now that I no longer have an IntelliJ license) for doing heavy-duty Java, but if I can get away with it, I prefer to do things in MacVim. Eclipse is just too clunky feeling when I want to do simple text editing tasks; it totally throws me out of my flow. That's why I'm on HN right now, as a matter of fact. So clearly, I am not an unbiased observer. That said: have you tried Pathogen/Vundle? Vim plugin management these days is light-years better than the equivalent Eclipse nightmare (I've given up on about half my Eclipse plugins as things constantly break).

Most command-line junkie types actually use vim, not vi. vim is quite practical for editing an enormous variety of file types at breakneck speed, and this is coming from someone who used to exclusively use environments such as Eclipse.

The best programmers use either Emacs or vim. vim goes way beyond "simple text editing" you don't seem to know what you're talking about.

No! No, no, no, no, no. The best programmers use whatever they use. You are making the same mistake as the guy you're replying to. There is no one best way. We need to get over this mentality as a community. I don't mean to pick on you, as this was clearly just an off-the-cuff comment, but this kind of dialogue is simply worthless. I agree that the grandparent poster seems pretty clueless about vim and its ilk, but an equal and opposite reaction that's just as subjective and baseless will get us nowhere.

> The best programmers use either Emacs or vim.

Do you really think that? I can assure you that you're wrong: many world-class programmers use editors other than Emacs or vim.

There are great programmers who use Microsoft Visual Studio, Komodo IDE, Sublime Text 2, and many dozens of different editors.

> The best programmers use either Emacs or vim.

No, only the programmers that you know. One thing that makes a programmer great is that they will always pick the best tool for the job, not the tool that they are used to.

The point here is not that Eclipse or XCode is better than vim, it's that no matter how productive you are writing Java or Objective C with vim, you will be more productive using Eclipse or XCode.

The most beautiful women use skirts.

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