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:

• It’s fast. Really fast. Faster than I expected a full IDE written in Java to be.

• The editor is pretty good; syntax highlighting, brace matching, etc, all work without any special effort.

• No need to explicitly build to discover syntactic problems. Just save your file; within a couple of seconds you’ll get a list of all errors and warnings for that file in a window in the bottom of the screen, which is easily ignored if you don’t want to deal with them right then and there; problems are also syntax highlighted in the editor (think of how some email clients flag misspelled words – it’s the same idea). This is a hugely great thing. I got a lot more work done last night because I didn’t have to go through full explicit build cycles to find the stupid typos.

• At least on Windows – I haven’t tried it on OS X yet – the integration with the system is perfectly smooth. Dialogue boxes and the like all look and feel native.

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.