| Inconsistent Eclipse user experience [message #1267143] |
Sat, 08 March 2014 09:39  |
Eclipse User |
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Hi,
I am having more and more difficulties with Eclipse, not because it is not flexible enough but because the response of the user interface is inconsistent. When I perform an operation, I expect it to give the same results and rely on this to work efficiently. When a key binding sometimes work, sometimes not, things quickly become painful for me.
It seems that things got worse from versions to versions of Eclipse. I am now using Kepler. Is it because there are just too many different plugins that conflict with each other?
Here are several examples of this
- When hitting CTRL-spacebar to perform code completion, I am getting all sorts of incorrect results. Sometimes, it completes correctly. Other times, it resolves a class from an obscure com.sun package and adds it to my imports. Other times, it strictly does nothing while I know for sure there is a class or variable beginning with that name. I rely heavily on code completion, because I am working with an ill-designed library with all sorts of classes and fields/methods in them, and don't have the bandwith to do a full rearchitecturing on it or rewrite the application on top of a better designed framework.
- Sometimes, selecting a launch configuration with arrow keys and hitting enter twice to run it works. Sometimes, it runs a previous launch configuration. Using the mouse is fully reliable but less efficient.
- When setting a conditional breakpoint, sometimes it works, sometimes it keeps complaining about a compilation error. I checked, double checked, triple checked, the condition, I made sure compilation is including symbols in the .class files (otherwise local names don't get resolved), with no improvement over this. When this happens, the only thing I can do is remove the breakpoint, modify the code temporarily (with the risk of forgetting the change) with an if (condition) { System.out.println("Bla") } and put a regular breakpoint at the sysout.
- When using the Groovy Eclipse plugin, this is even worse: code completion is totally erratic and almost never works and conditional breakpoints fail systematically to compile.
- In the debugger, double-clicking a variable name to expand it and see the field, this sometimes works, sometimes does nothing. So I sometimes end up double-clicking many times to see the fields of a class.
- When hoovering on a symbol in the code during debugging, this sometimes shows the value of the variable and fields, sometimes just a tooltip giving the type of the variable.
Maybe Eclipse just doesn't scale for large enterprise projects, unless very strict design patterns and development procedures are enforced. But no other IDEs beat Eclips: NetBeans just won't build the Maven-based project although it runs Maven directly while I don't like the two-tier model of IDEA (you get the free version, don't know when it will block you and force you to switch to the commercial version). The lack of easy to use profiling tools for CPU time and memory let me believe there is no clear solution in the free/open source world.
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Perhaps the reason you're getting completely erratic code assist in Groovy Eclipse is coming from broken JDT component in your Eclipse as Groovy Eclipse has a lot of dependencies on JDT.