Integrated development environment (IDE)

IDEs are absolutely essential for developing complex software.

The funny thing is that you don't notice this until someone shows it to you. But once you see it, there is not turning back, just like Steve Jobs customers don't know what they want quote.

Unfortunately, after the Fall of Eclipse (archive), the IDE landscape in 2019 is horrible and split between:

Programmers of the world: unite! Focus on one IDE, and make it work for all languages and all build systems. Give it all the features that Eclipse has, but none of the bugginess. Work with top project to make sure the IDE works for all top projects.

Projects of the world: support one IDE, with in-tree configuration. Complex integration is often required between the IDE and the build system, and successful projects must to that once for all developers. Either do this, or watch you complex project wither away.

Build tool maintainers: make it possible for IDEs to support your tool! E.g., implement JSON Compilation Database output so that IDEs can read the exact compiler commands from that, in order to automatically determine how files should be parsed! Or better, just use libllvm in your IDE itself as the main parser.

Ciro is evaluating some IDEs at: github.com/cirosantilli/ide-test-projects

Either extracted from, or designed for, vscode by Microsoft:

However also at the same time very limited integration with vscode, that makes using it for VScode compatibility almost useless, e.g.:

Before we get a decent open source integrated development environment, what else can you do?

But also perfect for small one-off files when you don't have the patience to setup said IDE.

vim's defaults are atrocious for the 21st century! Vundle is reasonable as an ad-hoc package manager, but it can't set fixed versions of packages:

Vimscript unit testing!!!

Ciro Santilli contributed a bit to this, and was even given push rights, see also: see also: Ciro Santilli's minor projects.

Since you can't escape shitty browser GUIs and live in the command line, the next best thing you can do is to bring Vim bindings to your browser :-)

There is one major annoyance: you can't use ESC to leave the address bar focus, but using Tab as a workaround works:

Once upon a time (early 2010's), Eclipse dominated the IDE landscape and all was good. NetBeans was around too. And Java was still unmarred by Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc..

But then something happened.

For some reason, Eclipse started to decay.

And the project that had once been a vibrant community of awesomeness, started to become... a zombie of its former self.

Buggyness started increasing. And not even hard to fix bugs. One liners that affect every user immediately after startup.

Sometimes, to Eclipse's defense they weren't "bugs". Just features that it became evident with time every programmer expected from a modern IDE.

But somehow the Eclipse community had a deep problem. A cancer. It had completely lost touch with user experience.

Perhaps is was due to the increasing interest of the several corporations that had adopted Eclipse as the base IDE for the proprietary solutions?

Perhaps.

Many users stuck to the IDE.

Some heroic efforts were made as plugins that drastically improved certain defects. The Darkest Dark plugin comes to mind.

But all those efforts required configuration. A setup time that most users simply don't have. The core devteam had become dumb and dead, unable to incorporate such changes.

This greatly opened up the space for other competing IDEs to come along. The "semi feature complete but at least easy to use and not so buggy" Visual Studio Code and the proprietary JetBrains IDEs being some of the most notable ones.

Using Eclipse as of the early 2020's is such a mixed experience. If you spend enough time to configure out the key buggyness, there are moments where you can feel "OMG, this feature is amazing".

But the effort is just too great, and soon another bug or obvious missing feature hits you and brings you back to reality.

Every young person uses VS Code now. Eclipse is dead, and there is no way back, usage will just continue dropping.

RIP, Eclipse. It wasn't meant to be.

Bibliography:

Persistent undo history:

It is especially bad on large projects, unless you carefully whitelist only the small source directories: