Ketan's Musings

Most colleagues use IntelliJ Idea as their favorite Java IDE. I’m an Eclipse plugin developer, and Eclipse happens to be my favorite Development platform of choice.

A lot more that just once, I’ve seen peers curse Eclipse for the lack of keyboard support, lack of refactoring, lack of functionality, lack of blah, blah, blah…

Let me address some of these issues:

Lack of Keyboard Support

Most IntelliJ idea users I’ve seen never touch the mouse. They can do most development using the keyboard: navigating, refactoring, writing code. It is amazing how good IntelliJ is at increasing productivity.

That said, Eclipse is definitely something that can be compared to IntelliJ on this front. Eclipse supports emacs keybindings, and I’ve seen people use emacs keybindings to do all the things that I’ve mentioned above.

It’s merely a matter of learning new keybindings, or configuring existing ones to suit their needs.

Lack of Refactoring Support

The refactoring support in Eclipse is as good as that on IntelliJ. Most folks have not used (much of) Eclipse and I feel that this particular point holds no relevance.

Lack of Functionality

Part of this blame also goes to me. There’s a whole lot of functionality that is available, that I’ve myself never used. I’m unable to point out out some functionality that exists in IntelliJ, but is not “easily” seen on Eclipse

A point in case is being able to override equals() and hashCode(). During a training session this morning, we had to create a class that overrides equals() and hashCode(). I’d almost never had to write these, so I began the tremendous task of hand coding these methods. Later I decided to write an eclipse plugin

Later in the evening, I realized that this feature already existed