I made a number of tentative pokes at Eclipse before hanging in there
long enough to want to switch over.
It is not nearly as complicated as you might first think.
The biggest problem is knowing what they mean by a workspace, and
project, and a perspective. They sound grand and mysterious,but
simple as could be.
a workspace is simple the aggregate of all the source and class files
in a one directory tree.
It consists of several projects, each with many packages, each with
many classes.
The key is understanding that a project is not the same as a package
as you may be used to thinking
Eclipse has all kinds of optional windows, called views, you can bring
up or dismiss. One of my favourites is the package explorer that lets
you find any method or variable in any class in any package.
A "perspective" then is just a convenient combination of windows/views
-- a layout so that you can quickly bring up a convenient set for
editing, debugging, running or any other task.
Whomever assigned the keystrokes never used Windows. None of them map
by default to the usual Windows places, not even F3. However, that
all can be rectified with patience.
It is a whole different style of working where you hand over more and
more editing and fixing to Eclipse. Coming back it feels as if my Text
editor is lazy or asleep.
I make great use of the format and method reordering to keep programs
tidy rather than for example taking effort to insert a new variable or
method where it logically belongs. Just stick it at the end or right
next the method you are working on, then let Eclipse clean it up.
Don't waste keystrokes fiddling with the stars or spacing, or line
length in comments. Eclipse will clean it all up.
Use the global rename to get the names of thing absolutely perfect to
avoid ambiguities. When the code is about done you can use longer
names that will bake the code clearer for maintenance.
I have never used a debugger that so seamlessly integrated. It points
you to the exact place in the code every time. It does not ignore
some breakpoints, or refuse to divulge the values of some variables
when you hit a breakpoint. It knows the types of everything.
The place that give me the biggest hassle is jar building. Eclipse
can't seem to build a decent jar so I export and do it the old
fashioned way. However all my pent-up class renaming, splitting, and
moving around that I do drives that process nuts. My lists of what to
include in the jars are always badly out of date.
I have despised ant as a lot of fuss to do what you could more easily
do with a simple bat file, but I guess I will have to learn it
properly to use genjar.
The bottom line, give Eclipse a try, and stick with it for a few days.
It really is far far simpler than it first looks. This is so much
faster than the old text editor way of writing code.
