I’ve tried a few editors before, but never found anything that I really liked.
Sure there is Emacs, Notepad (yeah right), Notepad++, Java StudioCreator, Netbeans, JIDEA, and Dreamweaver, but I never really found anything in them that was much better than just good old “Textpad”.
I had some vague recollection of the guy who I replaced who replaced a guy who several years ago used to use eclipse but dumped it in favor of Netbeans or something like that, so I never really gave it a shot.
Last night someone turned me on to Eclipse though, and I checked it out. The more I learn, the more I like. Besides all of the “normal” textpad-like features, it has some really interesting productivity enhancing features. I’ve not had time to really get to know it extremely well yet, but I can already say that it will be replacing Textpad as my default editor.
My favorite feature thus far is the “navigator” toolbar (sidebar).
It allows you to simultaneously view multiple projects and drill down as far as methods (that’s like functions for you PHP and .NET programmers) in a java file. That means if you are looking to jump straight to a specific method inside of a Java file, all you have to do is expand the view of that file and double click the method you want to edit. Awesome!!!
This will come in very handy for some projects that I have to maintain that my predecessors wrote that have all methods in one giant un-commented “Utility” package. Blech!
Oh, and you can use Eclipse for PHP as well… Pretty sweet!
About the Author
I’m a die hard Dreamweaver fan. I used to use Textpad, but Dreamweaver has so much built in functionality that it makes it really easy for me to code. Color/symbol libraries right when you need them (vs.net 2005 doesn’t even have that), site manager, a huge directory of file extension recognition, auto tag closing, etc. The only downside is that it’s not free.
And don’t ever use the design view. Ever ever.
Yeah, Dreamweaver can be cool, and I flip-flopped between it and Textpad for a while, but I eventually just stuck with Textpad for lots of little reasons (mostly just that it was what I had used for longer, and was used to, and there weren’t a whole lot of benefits to using Dreamweaver). I don’t think Dreamweaver had macros did it? That might have been why I went with Textpad. I use macros a lot…
One more really neat thing I have found with eclipse is that it not only tells you all of your errors and warnings before you even try to compile, it *offers you solutions*. Hey, you forgot to specify that that ArrayList was going to hold Participant objects… Want me to fix that for you? Sure! Thanks Eclipse! It’s like having someone watching your back and helping out where they can…