I can vouch for my experience with Eclipse as being frustrating and slow. I thought it must be my own idiocy everybody else just seemed to love it. I hope they can improve it I would like to use it.

I felt exactly the same when I tried the latest Netbeans - it just seemed so much slicker than the monstrosity that is Eclipse and its flakey plugin system. "Eclipse integration" is becoming synonymous with "half a job" and "sort of works". Sort it out.

I'll admit, Eclipse used to be dangerously complicated, inducing brain hemorrhage in around 70% of its users, and joining the ranks of C++, something you can't "just figure out" without first reading the manual.

However, in the past year, a LOT of work has been put into simplifying the system and reorganizing the UI. Now I think the look and feel is clean, most of the nasty docking surprises (any Ecplise user will know) are gone, and a lot of other general bloat and nastyness has been removed.

If we're going to make it EVEN MORE use friendly, excellent, have at it, but new users shouldn't feel put off by this article, go try Eclipse now, it's free and you might like it.

I moved to NetBeans, and 6.0 is just SOOO much easier than Eclipse. Anyone who hasn't tried it should do. Eclipse lost its way, and then became a pawn to IBM's bureaucracy. With MySQL integration and Glassfish, it appears Sun's got their momentum back.

http://blogs.sun.com/roumen/entry/netbeans_7_0_plans_uncovered

Only IDE I ever liked was Borland's, that was quite well put together.

But really, command line tools and vim do the job very well, I just don't get the appeal of having some bulky tool that is hard to move from language to language. Each to their own I suppose.

Seriously, they lost the battle to Swing years ago. And having most of your current GUI code as Swing and the RCP using SWT for GUIs is a big disadvantage with the RCP.

And simplify the IDE. Everything could be so much more intuitive.

Flamebait, but anyway...

I regularly use Java, PHP and Python and switch between perspectives with one click. Eclipse has no problem using different mark-up on different editors simultaneously. The concept of a perspective is important as I can view code structure, project structure, dynamic log files and image previews all at the same time, different layout for each language (eg browser in PHP, console in Java). I can program lazily, knowing that I can quickly refactor once I'm happy with a piece of code, changing object names across the entire codebase, pulling out interfaces, etc before I commit (which I can also do with a single click; and also review and compare changes - oh yes, you use diff).

I think I can sum up my requests in one word: speed.

As nice as extra features are (well, can be, at least), if the speed of the IDE suffers as a result, I'd much rather do without them.

I'm in the slightly odd position of using Eclipse at home, and M$ Visual Studio at work, and in general, VS does feel faster to use. I've possibly just started a war there. Sorry in advance if so :-).

However, whatever you do / don't like about VS's features, cost, language support, parentage, required OS, or any of that, it's code completion and navigation is just so responsive! Which is a real shame really, because I'd much rather work on my Linux desktop writing Java than WinXP / C#...

(Aside: yes, I could use gedit, gnome-terminal and javac, but I admit I need a little more pampering than that :-p)