Saturday, May 10, 2008

Eclipse

I've been an Eclipse user ever since I started programming in Java *way* back in 2006 and I've been very happy with Eclipse ever since then. I have to admit that I've used Netbeans a few times before, but I've always preferred Eclipse to Netbeans, mostly for the wide array of plugins available for Eclipse. Since Netbeans 6.1 has come out I've been tempted to jump over and compare the two yet again. This got me thinking about what I like about Eclipse and also what has been annoying the hell out of me the past couple weeks. So here are a few things that have been driving me crazy about Eclipse.



1. Project Explorer Forgets
















Maybe this is an incorrect setting or something but why does my project explorer forget where it was when I restart Eclipse? If I have a project workspace setup and have tab open, I'd like to have the project explorer also remember where I was in the folder system. It gets really old to have to navigate back to the folder I was looking at when I restarted Eclipse to get a new plugin. This really drives me crazy since the projects I have are pretty large and it makes Eclipse lag a bit while it opens the folder tree.



Update: Thanks to George's awesome comment, my problem has been solved! Eclipse has had the "link with editor" button for a while now and it keeps the navigator tree open to the files you have open. Thanks!



















2. Helpful Tips







I love the fact that I can hover my mouse over a class and see the default Javadoc for that class, but I have one serious complaint about this tool tip. Why is it not HTML? Javadoc allows you to link to other classes' Javadoc using HTML tags as well as the {@link} tag. Why can I not click on it when I focus on the tool tip? I know I can ctrl+click on the class to go there, but you are ignoring all the HTML rendering that can be done with Javadoc! This is annoying as hell! Please Eclipse, take a hint from Netbeans and fix this!



Update: Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede fixed this problem. Go get Ganymede and enjoy all the new features. (I like the new update system)



























 



Off the top of my head those are my most annying complaints, but as I run into more issues with Eclipse I'll post my issues here.

2 comments:

  1. Would this solve the first problem?http://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_How_do_I_link_the_Navigator_with_the_currently_active_editor%3F

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  2. @George That did exactly what I wanted. Thanks for the tip!

    ReplyDelete