All right, you guys convinced me to give Eclipse another shot. So, I'm going to really try to get into it this time before I knock it.
Ask HN: Reasonable Java editor for heavily CLI-oriented UNIX types who hate bloat?
51–53 of 53 posts
Re: Ask HN: Reasonable Java editor for heavily CLI-oriented UNIX types who hate bloat?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
The java language is actually very small and easy to remember. The standard library, on the other hand, is huge. If there's any glory in remembering what the constructor arguments are for a certain class, it's lost on me. Plus, in the real world, many of us use what we call "third party code" which could be as simple as something as a database driver or some kind of utility class. If you think you're going to remembe…
> In your world, you spend a week doing it and probably typing javac over and over on the command line. Perhaps you should learn to use the command line if you think refactoring without an IDE takes a week. :-/
How long would it take you to refactor say an entire package hierarchy in an open source project like jfreechart? Id love to see a video of how this happens as evidence.
Re: Ask HN: Reasonable Java editor for heavily CLI-oriented UNIX types who hate bloat?
#53Anybody who writes java code in anything outside of Eclipse, NetBeans or IntelliJ is wasting their time. It doesn't take an enormous amount of time to learn how to use Eclipse. It probably takes 15 minutes of someone showing you the ropes. You need to stop thinking of the problem as "I need a text editor" because that's almost certainly not what you need. Eclipse in particular does nothing like what you claim ("unnec…
I just installed Eclipse, and in the workspace directory, it created a ".metadata" directory, containing 9.2M. Most of it is here (output from du -h):
8.8M ./.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.core
I would love to have automatic refactoring tools, but they often don't do quite what I specifically need (and I don't need to do it often enough to become practiced with what the tool can do.) Last time I needed a lot of boilerplate, I wrote a quick script to do code generation for me. I very rarely need it, but it was a guilty pleasure to write the tool.
The other thing I like about Eclipse is that javac is always already loaded, so you don't have that 2-3 second start-up delay. So... I wrote a little javac server - javac is sitting there in the background, and I send it the src files and switches from a client - instant compile! I hardly use this either, but again it was fun to write.
Speaking for myself, most of my programming time isn't spent in editing, compiling, debugging or looking up docs - it's mostly spent in understanding new problems - with pen and paper. Typing is the easy part!
But my projects are unusual. It's funny, in trying out Eclipse, I'm more interested in the cool ideas they've had than in actually using it. It does have some cool stuff in it.