As an old fart who has settled into using emacs whenever I can, I hear about Eclipse every so often.
Is there any real reason to use Eclipse and give up all the knowledge of emacs and packages, plus the macros I wrote for it?
A:
I don't know if you'd count this as a real reason, but I certainly enjoy having Eclipse's excellent code completion and customizable templates.
perimosocordiae
2009-09-23 05:47:11
+1
A:
I also tend to use Emacs whenever possible, but for Java I will still occasionally fire up Eclipse to use its refactoring tools.
Phil
2009-09-23 05:53:45
A:
Probably not. After a brief (decade) stint with Visual Studio, I'm squarely back in the Vim camp now and like it here. I thought I'd try Eclipse a while ago but it only took a couple of hours to realise that I simply wouldn't be comfortable in that environment.
Stick with the tools you know, and know them well.
Greg Hewgill
2009-09-23 05:54:09
A:
It for me totally depends on the language/environment I'm working in. For something like Java Eclipse is a life-saver but for other languages having code-completion and auto-imports might not be all that important.
In the end it mostly comes down to where you yourself feel more productive.
Horst Gutmann
2009-09-23 05:54:50
+1
A:
emacs and vi don't intrinsically support building, debugging, "project"-based collections of files, etc -- Eclipse and other IDEs do, so that's the IDE's plus... better integration, wrt the "motley collection of plugins" for powerful-but-not-IDE editors such as vim and emacs.
That being said -- I'm a vim lifer (30+ years since I started w/vi, before viM was built;-) and I stand in awe of my emacs'er colleagues (have to ack that, no matter how incredibly powerful vim is, emacs is a notch above). But I think I also see how the smooth, seamless integration of IDE's such as Eclipse can help my younger colleagues who're addicted to THOSE!-)
Alex Martelli
2009-09-23 05:58:40
vim supports a "build" button. Its well integrated, usually its configured to save your file and call make. There are supporting macros "next error" which go to the source code line and display the error message!
James Anderson
2009-09-23 06:09:10
+1
A:
If you are doing Java, yes. Support for browsing the code, for code completion and refactoring is worth it, IMHO.
If you are doing C/C++, maybe. Support for the language is not as good, but I still like the overall view it gives me on the project, searching the whole hierarchy and the SVN support, especially the synchronize view.
Eclipse can be switched to key bindings which mimic the basic Emacs setup.
It is still easy to switch to Emacs temporarily for doing something more sophisticated, e.g. with keyboard macros.
starblue
2009-09-23 05:58:53
How is the browsing differnt from using tags on emacs or vi?Are there other languages ( the scripting languages, C#, D etc. )where Eclipse provides as much an advantage?
BubbaT
2009-09-23 13:28:13
I never got around to using tags in Emacs, so I can't compare that (I used search within a directory and grep globally). The only other language I used in Eclipse is Scala, and its plugin is still very rough.
starblue
2009-09-23 14:04:15
+1
A:
The most important feature for me is refactoring: Renaming of methods, classes and interfaces on all locations they are used.
With that you can change the complete structure of your project easily.
tangens
2009-09-23 05:59:52
A:
Refactoring and java completion are big reasons to use Eclipse. Unfortunately, the emacs keybindings in eclipse are incomplete, it doesn't understand ^x2 or any other of the buffer manipulation macros, it doesn't understand keyboard macros, and it's missing a whole bunch of other features as well.
The problem is that emacs support can't be done with clever keybindings that sit on top of conventional WYSIWYG editor: it needs a fundamentally different approach to accessing the edit buffer. This could be added to eclipse, but so far nobody has bothered.
Perhaps you will?
vy32
2009-09-23 06:29:03