90% of Eclipse users in Germany satisfied
Today on a Germany news portal a news scrolled by that apparently 90% of the German Eclipse users are satisfied.
Maybe they have pretty low expectations, got used to it’s quirks, or otherwise not know any other IDE, as personally I find Eclipse the most annoying IDE ever. Even Vim and (X)Emacs manage to top it by far - that is not get in the way as Eclipse does all the time. Out of the blue my most annoying issues of Eclipse (for C++) are:
- builds all files by default, requires to explicitly remove files (e.g. intended for another platform, or tests or old reference files etc, …), this also can result in formerly perfectly fine projects to no longer build when other platforms got new files, …
- many popup dialogs asking insane questions (do you really want to quit, do you really want to xyz?) which all of the require some “do not show again, remember my choice” checkbox to be checked for a less annoying workflow
- at least for me in the C++ version it was not possible to change the build output directory (not even by manually tweaking the XML file), thus clobbering debug build files into my project’s debug sub-directory with actually source code utility files in there, …
- copying a project from one computer to another (VM) made me wonder how on earth to open it, turned out that deeply hidden at: Import (!!!) -> General -> Existing Project into Workspace
- in one case the generated include paths where also out of of sync from what was shown in the UI, I found no solution for that problem and reverting my project files in the end to fix this, …
- the latest stable version (Ganymede SR2) does not even start here (obscure Java errors, whatever), only the original (non service) release (Ganymede / 3.4.0) actually worked
All in all Eclipse is by far the worst IDE on my personal scale. Working with it feels like a fight against windmills. Even Microsoft’s Visual C++ Studio is more fun and less annoying to use. Of course currently Xcode tops all of them, …
