Bill, cut the anti-SWT rhetoric and stick to your review of the IDE! It just doesn''t apply.

I agree with many of the posts abpve. As a die hard emacs user, I am learning eclipse and am very impressed. But the key binding issue is real pain. I just can''t start using this tool without emacs key binding being available. Also, the emacs key board macro recording is huge. If these things where fixed, I would be come a complete convert.

I disagree that SWT is the reason Eclipse is such a good IDE. SWT is the cause of much frustration on the part of the rest of the community and I think to a certain extent limits the Eclipse market.

The real value of Eclipse is its usability and productivity gains. The plugin architecture is cool too but to the average IDE user its just the availability of plugins that is great the API is not that important to them (except that it makes writing plugins ''easier'' for others and thus there are more of them).

''ridiculous'' might be a bit strong...

Yes it can be hard to make the switch but over all I find the productivity gains from moving to Eclipse worth the retraining. I did emacs for about 13 years before moving to Eclipse. I still miss some of my favorite keys (C-k, C-y, C-n etc) but overall I find Eclipse worth the switch. And besides at some point, someone who has actually used emacs will build the key bindings. Till then I''m content to run my shells in emacs and do my java in Eclipse.

It is ridiculous that Eclipse M8 does not support emacs keybindings...espcially when it is a feature in older versions!

I have been using JDEE/XEmacs for over 5 years, and XEmacs for almost 10 years now. Working in Eclispe is like speaking in German but speaking in English...you have to translate every sentance in your head and it makes coding painfully slow.

Over all M8 is good and SWT is still the reason that Eclipse is such a good IDE, despite the complaints.

I disagree with Rolf - I found M8 to be much faster and smoother at many things over M7. There is still room for improvement however.

As for key bindings I think they should be done at the basic ''text editor'' level and therefore set once for ALL editors.

Some things can''t be forgotten, and for me, it''s the
cursor movement of emacs keys.

For me, Ctrl+AENPFBKY need to be mappable from all editing contexts. I need Ctrl-K to cut-lines, and Ctrl-Y to paste. I can adjust to all the other keys no problems, but I need those keys.

And it''s actually faster than reaching for arrow keys
all the time. I find when I am doing anything non-java in Eclipse, I am not very productive because I keep stopping what I am doing, and trying to figure out how to get my keys working correctly.

I still remotely login to unix hosts and use text-only editors. And I use the same damned old editor for editing files. My fingers remember and it is re-enforced.

I can learn many other key bindings from eclipse, but for me, those are basic primitives, that will never change. I''m not alone - there are a lot of other emacs users who refuse to use Eclipse because they use those basic keys all the time.

It''s such a shame - eclipse developers want to be embraced by the open-source community and they make it so difficult for emacs users to use it!! Imagine if you had all these old die-hard emacs programmers joining and helping out in making Eclipse better?

Hi Rolf,

Thanks for the comment!

I have been doing ''serious development'' with M8 since I started using it 4 or 5 weeks ago. The only thing that gives me real headaches is that XMLBuddy does not work well in M8. There are a few rough spots as noted earlier but the focus os M8 was not solely on ''eye candy'' as you put it. The RCP had lots of work, Ant & other editors were enhanced etc (take a look at the list above).

I would not expect to have the UI revert any time soon. I think we are here to stay.

I think M8 is not very stable, and is too much focused on eye-candy, making it a slow milestone. I''d recommend M7 over M8 if you are doing serious development work anytime.

I hope M9 contains performance improvements, and will return to "native" widgets which are much more "real estate friendly" and faster.

For those saying eclipse has "potential": Eclipse IS the best IDE out there, despite complaints about M8. It outperforms, outhandles, and outprices ;-) any java IDE I''ve seen. If you want your java developers to be efficient, without a steep IDE learning curve, go with Eclipse 3.0 (M7 in my opinion).

Ein wirklich sehr Interessante Seite mit guten Informationen.

Hi Alan,

Thanks for the feedback!

Window ->Show View -> Other -> Other -> Cheat Sheets
Once the view is up, from the menu see ''creating an eclipse plugin with pde'' to see one of the longer ones.

I have given up making Eclipse speak Emacs, I just gave up and learned Eclipse.

Ant run configurations are under the ''running man with a suitcase'' button. Usually near the run & debug buttons. Select ''External Tools...'' from the pull down. It brings up the launch configurations for external tools (ant integration is one) and in there you can set up or delete the ant configurations.

The performance of the Ant editor is the most annoying, however I''ve been getting intermittent problems so I''m willing to live with it for now.

In M7 there was a whole reworking of the way key bindings worked but it got scrubbed because too many people did not like it. I''m hopeful that it will make it back in to post 3.0 builds (on the way to 3.1 and 4.0). This is clearly a hot topic because there are 97 bugs with ''key bindings'' in their descriptions.

Where are these cheatsheets? I can''t find em.

The ant launch configurations are created when you say
"run ant..." instead of just run. Then, you create a new build configuration where you choose which targets you want built. If you just right-click and select "run" it will run the default configuration, but as soon as you create multiple ones, it asks you which one you want to run. Definitely tedious.

They should allow you to still single-click to run the default run configuration. That would be a good feature request.

I looked a long time before I could figure out hwo to remove /edit those extra ant configurations. I finally found it, and I wanted to post where it is, but I tried again and I can''t find it now. I wonder if it disappears depending on which perspective/view you are in. in any case, it should be a menu choice in the ant view.

The ant editor has some other funky things about it that I don''t like, so I use XMLBUDDY when I am editing ant files.

I''ve been so frustrated trying to get Ctrl-A working as an emacs key - going to the left side of the editor window. It seems I''ve had to define it in a bunch of different contexts but it still doesn''t work from Java editing mode.

Still, eclipse has a lot of potential. I just wish they had done the keyboard-action-context bindings better (like the way it''s done in Jedit - with each plugin coming with its own bindable actions, and one place/context where you can assign them all).

I have been using m8 since the day it was released. I have found the Ant editor to be extremely slow. Sometimes a second a keystroke slow. It has many nice features but attention has to be paid to the performance now.

Big projects with lots of source directories cause it to wig out eventually and sometimes crash.

There are some other minor annoyances. E.g. Ant run. When I run another target it often creates a second (or a third...) launch config. Next time you go to run the build it stops and asks you which config it wants you to use. I haven''t quite been able to figure out the rules under which it does this, but it''s often enough to be very boring.