EclipseCon NA 2014: Making the Eclipse IDE fun again

Many Eclipse IDE users are still happy using Eclipse as their daily Java IDE - and indeed, the Java tooling in Eclipse is great. But don’t you hear people saying things like: Eclipse got too big, too slow, too clunky, too overloaded with features and plugins, doesn't support language X, hard to configure, and similar complaints? I do. I hear people complaining about all sorts of things and I am afraid of Eclipse losing its great reputation as an IDE. As a consequence, I think, we should try to make Eclipse fun again.

This talk started at EclipseCon Europe 2013 and threw in some proposals for making Eclipse fun again, showed some live demos of features we worked on to achieve this, and started a discussion about many of the ideas we’ve been having. This discussion should continue at EclipseCon NA 2014, showing the progress that has been made in the meantime and trigger discussion for further work. The Eclipse IDE should be fun again.

Transcript

1. Making the Eclipse IDE
   fun again EclipseCon NA 2014 Fred Bricon Lars Vogel Tony McCrary Martin Lippert
2. What do you think
   of the Eclipse IDE?
3. Eclipse is great awesome Java tooling fantastic ecosystem most widely used IDE ships new releases on time etc.
4. Sometimes... ...I hate Eclipse
5. Sometimes... ...I hate Eclipse.com
7. Did you ever had to hit F5?! ! “File is out of date -> Hit F5 to refresh... M****r F****r! Refresh it yourself! FAIL”
8. I guess you have seen this before...! ! “Building Workspace (16%)”
9. Cancel if you can! ! “When I cancel a task, it hangs and ends up taking longer than it would have taken to let it finish.”
10. That makes sense
11. ever opened a non-java source code?! ! “Why the hell can GitHub do syntax highlighting for so many languages and my Eclipse can’t?” ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! (not talking about specific language support)
12. ever opened a .ini file in Eclipse on windows?! ! Better not...
13. ever tried to work with nested projects?! ! “Enjoy the workarounds…”
14. search in Eclipse is powerful...! ! “but to find something is not always that easy”
15. “I want an IDE. Not an Meta IDE framework factory with too much shit going on and I have to manually install and setup plugins”
16. “If Eclipse were a person, I would drag him behind my car.”
17. So lets make
    the Eclipse IDE fun again
18. Demo Time
    ! we want to show some stuff
    that you can use and/or do right away
19. Demo Time Fred • getting rid of “resource is out of sync” • maven/gradle improvements • Cmd+3 • LiveReload
20. Demo Time Lars • Platform improvements • dark theme • and more…
21. Demo Time Martin • restarting apps: new buttons that make sense • code completion made intelligent - eclipse code recommenders • quick search-as-you-type • Bonus track
22. Demo Time Tony • Bling / Twilight • SWT on OpenGL
23. And now?
24. What’s happening at Eclipse? Communication ide-dev@eclipse.org ! Working Group Initiative eclip.se/k
25. LiveReload and extended m2e/Maven setup (part of JBoss Tools/ Developer Studio)
 http://jboss.org/tools Start-Stop-Buttons
 https://github.com/spring-projects/eclipse-integration-commons Eclipse Core Recommenders
 http://www.eclipse.org/recommenders/ Quick Search-as-you-type
 http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/quick-search-eclipse Bling IDE
 http://www.l33tlabs.com/
26. Thanks for coming Join the discussion on the ide-dev mailing list