Is it me or is eclipse a piece of shit

I know eclipse is free, but come on, I don't know how people actually use this piece of shit to build software. I like open source as much as the next guy, I just like "high quality open source" which may be an oxymoron.

Here are a bunch of my pet peeves so far:

  • When debugging your warped to a new tab with the screen in a completely brain dead configuration. So I'm forced to reorganize the screen so it looks somewhat simple. Listen this isn't mission control I don't need to see everything at once.
  • When debugging the first message you see in the console is "The application will continue after a brief delay" all I can say is WTF, I want to debug now, not after the intermission you tools As it turns out this isn't Eclipses fault, but copy protection in one of the libraries I'm using so mea culpa on this one.
  • When debugging the only way to see the "step over, step into" buttons is to switch to the debug tab, your kidding me right? So far I haven't found a way to get those buttons to appear in the top tool/button bar.
  • Maybe I have a buggy eclipse, but it took me three or four tries before eclipse would stop at my break point, the previous runs just stopped running, didn't high light my break point line nothing, thanks for coming out.
  • Why is it when eclipse pops up the bubble for the arguments of a function your using it insists of calling the arguments "Type arg0, …" I mean come on, your killing me here, this also happens in the debugger as well when looking at the variables of the functions, totally lame.
  • When you high light a secion of code and click the right mouse button you get a big list of options and where are the "copy and paste" items, down in the middle, I'm not sure about this but I bet "copy and paste" are to of the most common options when you have selected text, yet you make me scroll down the menu to the middle, tools. Yeah I know there are keystroke short cuts.
  • When I'm editing and hit save, eclipse feels compelled to warp me to somewhere else in my code i.e. where the program has stopped in debug mode. Dudes I'm not in the debug view don't warp me to the program counter, maybe I want to continue editing, I just like to save a lot 'cause I don't trust eclipse.
  • The default keystroke for search again is ctrl-k give me a break if my hands were that big I'd be a much better basketball player, maybe I should get a smaller keyboard.

Indeed it's not surprising that I'm going to shell out a few dollars to upgrade to the latest Intellij because frankly eclipse sucks, and that is also why I shelled out the dollars for Komodo, since I want to get work done and not fight the tool no matter how free it is. Penny wise pound foolish.

228 Comments

  1. TD says:

    I would love to report most of my issues, but what is there to report if there are no errors! It’s a time bomb. My biggest problem is the php editor will suddenly scramble and double-space my text and the cursor will start jumping around as I type. I check the error logs and there is nothing. Another issue is having the editor randomly going back in its history 20 lines or so without retaining anything. Once again, no errors. Then there are the random errors and failures to create workspace randomly being thrown. These are ignoring the complaints for the counterintuitive design, which most I am happy to overlook. Never had these problems with anything dated before Helios. It’s a time bomb, and when it goes off, 2 hours of my day is thrown away.

  2. Android Dev says:

    It’s hard to believe that 6 years later, Eclipse is still a piece of dog-shit; on my MacBook Pro at work, I need to restart Eclipse at least 3 times a day.
    Granted, the project is very large… but still, Eclipse simply exiting out after a “clean” and during the “re-build” is inexcusable.
    I always know it’s time to restart Eclipse when the copy/paste keyboard shortcuts stop working… and by that I mean a Paste operation going into another file instead of the file I’m looking at.

    On Windows, Eclipse isn’t as bad.

  3. Rob says:

    Eclipse is most certainly a piece of shit. I’m doing android development and my god its terrible. I’ve been working with it for the past 4 or 5 years and the number of querks, crashes, and utter disasters i’ve had with it are astonishing. The problem is that android studio as it stands is STILL far worse. I just can’t believe google hasn’t gotten involved to sort things out earlier. There are some good features in eclipse but its outweighed by the problems. I’ve now just had it completely corrupt my Android manifest file when trying to export a signed APK. I’m now trying to repair the whole thing… what a freaken mess. My God.

  4. Travis says:

    Look i have not had any problems as of yet but i am new to the java scene. in fact i am just now learning java. however i would like to point out to some of you having problems with a large program that you need to try to keep your code as clean and simple as you can to get the same results obviously. and that you need to have a good enough PC to compile your code or it is bound to take for ever and or not complete and or be buggy. sometimes the problem is the user and not the program.

  5. Michael says:

    I’ve used both Eclipse and Netbeans and Netbeans is far better IDE than Eclipse. Eclipse is just a fucking mess. I think I spend 90% of time trying to to fix errors Eclipse throw every now and then. When I use Netbeans I never experience this. I only focus on writing my code. In my opinion Eclipse causes more problem than it tries to solve, just like Hibernate.

  6. Chandler says:

    @Android Dev

    The whole copy/paste thing is probably you accidentally ctrl + clicking on something. You see, in Eclipse, that is a feature… because the developers of Eclipse are from Mars and don’t understand simple, human things, like usability.

    You can remove that key mapping, but there are a 1000 other problems on top of it.

  7. Jose Carlos says:

    I work with Eclipse about 10 years, started at 2003… its still a piece of shit, I dont know the problem but will be a serious issue against productivity in Java Environments. The main problem is that factory owners DOESN´T WANT to pay for a good and stable IDE and try to use these open source craps, then their teams lacks of production and blames the team of course! They wont never blame the tool… its a serious issue in world of java development.

  8. Justin Reina says:

    Just curious, how many of you uber-haters ever filed bugs on your complaints? Call me crazy, but open-source only improves when the community knows what to fix.

    The benefits far outweigh the cons in most scenarios, from my experience using Eclipse for Java, Embedded Development and Android.

  9. techdetails says:

    I’m not sure why I would waste my time when Intellij is a superior tool.

    Google thinks so where Android is concerned.

  10. Wally Grey says:

    Today, Eclipse is indeed a stinky piece of shit. It used to be a good piece of shit but now it has basically become a useless piece of shit. Like all shit, it has gone bad over time. The good shit today is Chrome and all the javascript support for applications like V8 and Blink. It is time to move off the bad shit and onto the good shit and then you can become a hot shit!

  11. Bob says:

    I think it’s the biggest load of shit I’ve come across. I’ve been trying for two days now to run the default “Hello World” program, and I am sick to the back teeth of breaking off every 10 minutes to Google whatever the latest error has just come up on my screen. Every time I fix one error message, I simply get a new one. Utter, utter shit.

  12. Broken_bazooka says:

    Eclipse is one of those projects that’s beyond repair.
    It’s unbearably slow, they’ve chosen the wrong technology for almost everything, and most design decisions are wrong.
    It can’t be fixed, really, it should simply be deprecated and phased out.

    It’s a lot easier to just improve something like kdevelop, qtcreator or the gnome stuff, which at least got some stuff right.

  13. Bill says:

    Yup, it’s a total train-wreck. I used CDT under Windows/Cygwin for a few years. It kind of worked OK, but that was with makefile projects, so no Eclipse management of dependencies etc. I was more or less using Eclipse as a fancy editor. I’m currently using it under Ubuntu and trying to use all the features of an IDE. It’s a minefield. Disaster ensues if you put one foot outside of the workflow path envisaged by the designers. And this path is nowhere explicit. Eclipse refactoring (for example, if you move a directory) can render your code uncompilable, and leave you with an intensely manual fix-up job. The GDB interface is flaky as hell. Breakpoints bounce all over the place. Remote debug is click and hold your breath. I’m ditching Eclipse as soon as I get over the current work bump.

  14. Ilya says:

    8 years past, and Eclipse IDE is still the same shit! Arrgh!

  15. Joe says:

    Eclipse is a big piece of shit. Bugclipse. Getting worse and worse from version to version.

  16. I hate eclipse says:

    today, as we live in 2015, eclipse is still the worse thing you can use.
    if you thinking of wasting your time, eclipse is your way to go.

  17. Eshitpse says:

    Q: Why did google invent “Android Studio”
    A: Because Eclipse is a godforsaken PIECE OF SHIT

  18. Eclipse != Empathy says:

    Eclipse is a child abuser:
    http://techdetails.agwego.com/2007/02/23/121/comment-page-4/#comment-42134

    Child, have you forsaken a STEM career because of Eclipse?
    Please report.

  19. wow says:

    Wow, this is amazing. Googling for “Eclipse sucks” and this old post is still at the top of the search result.

  20. techdetails says:

    What was true then, is true now…

  21. junaid says:

    Reading this in 2016, and eclipse is still shitty as ever ! That’s what you call quality turdball software engineering.

    No matter what year, instead of people writing code, people are busy fighting their IDE (worse still, if eclipse has been imposed upon them as an IDE, since a bunch of project managers at big hardware vendors decided to get their bonuses by saving money on writing their own clean in-house IDEs, but instead plugged in a shitty plug-in to the turd called eclipse.

    Way to go !

  22. Poornima says:

    I agree. eclipse is a pain. The debugger is torturous. Suddenly the breakpoints don’t get set, bookmark dialogue opens when I double click a line. Just a few days back, I used to use the double click to set a break point. It changed all by itself. I wish I could afford something else other than eclipse IDE.

  23. Dynamo Dan says:

    Use jEdit. Every once in a while, I’ll install the latest Eclipse to check if they’ve improved it. Nope!! Back to jEdit.

  24. Kurt Becker says:

    I am glad I am not alone in my opinion.
    Mostly I do Hardware XILINX ZYNQ as well as SILABS Precision32
    Both use Eclipse.
    Over the years I have learned how to get around all these problems… don’t press this button.
    And yes, Auto-Save before compile does NOT work properly until today.

    Like what is the point of editing code, then compiling/downloading/debugging old code (before it was edited)
    while on the screen you see the new code…

    Companies use Eclipse because it is free, but it is really bad.
    Thousands of features, so the casual observer thinks this is something sophisticated… not so… chances are, it does not work.
    I am not a Microsoft fan, but Visual Studio was NEVER that bad.

    I read comments like: “Give me a constructive bug report”.
    My answer: “Run it yourself, you can’t miss them”.

    KB

  25. Dyz says:

    Never had any of these problems the OP mentions because I don’t use debugging features. Been working with eclipse for years. The only other editor I like is notepad++. I guess I just rely on my coding skills, not my IDE ;-P

  26. techdetails says:

    To each their own

  27. alan says:

    Well, here it is 8 years later and guess what…. it still sucks. God what a horrible chunk of shit.

  28. Dylan says:

    Eclipse is the best!

    /s

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