Overall Satisfaction with Eclipse
I started with Eclipse development as a Java IDE, then discovered it could handle many more programming languages such as C, Python, HTML/CSS/JS, PHP, and it grew to become my go-to application for general programming.
- Provides a broad range of programming language support. While the primary language support is Java, you can also add in support for C/C++, NodeJS, HTML/CSS/JS simply through the Eclipse Marketplace.
- Provides easy tools for debugging code. I have primarily used these when writing faulty Java and Python code.
- Provides an extensible plugin API for writing custom widgets. The Eclipse Marketplace hosts many useful utilities and extensions.
- I would like to see a better dark theme. The first few versions I used did not have one, but since, a few have been released, but I still find IntelliJ IDEA's Darcula theme to be better.
- It would be nice for Eclipse to work cleanly with other IDE projects without relying on external build tools. I once used a non-Maven/Gradle Java project to work with IntelliJ, and I managed to get it working, but I needed to re-write a few configuration files.
- The Eclipse "workspace" is where it stores the projects on the computer. There should be a better detection of modifications to this folder, or at least make the error conditions more understandable. For example, there have been times I have had projects not able to be opened or imported due to differences in the folder name or file structure of the folder in the workspace.
- Eclipse makes it quick and easy to write and debug code in the numerous programming languages it supports.
- When developing in teams, make sure build tools and version control are properly setup, otherwise configuration files get out-of-sync.
- Eclipse seems lighter on system resources, but IntelliJ seems smoother on newer hardware. For the cases where the Community
I primarily only use Eclipse if a project requires it or there is a plugin that is not supported by IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition