Eclipse

Last night I downloaded the Eclipse Java IDE to try to make a little progress on Bonaguil.

Wow.

Suffice it to say that I was bitter that I had to go in to work today and work in an environment without it. It is the best IDE I’ve ever used, and I’ve tried quite a few. It’s like music, love, and cookies all rolled up into one convenient package and available for free download. And I haven’t even tried the CVS integration yet. Things I like about Eclipse, in no particular order:

And, tonight, for the first time, I played with the refactoring support.

Oh my god.

Let me say that again: Oh. My. God. It’s like Ada Lovelace came in to rewrite your code for you. While making chocolate cake. And playing Bach on the harmonium. Naked. I haven’t been this enthusiastic about a development environment since discovering CALL -151.

Bonaguil is a pretty tiny project at this point, so I can’t say that the experience will continue to be fabulous with a sufficiently large project. But it feels right, and that makes me very optimistic. If you’re a developer, and haven’t tried Eclipse, you should. You can download it from the Eclipse project web site.