Jim Roepcke's weblog have browser, will travel (est. 1999)

Eclipse is great

At a Canada Day party on July 1st, a friend and I decided to write a computer version of a board game we like to play. We decided to use Java since he uses Windows and I use Mac OS X.

I thought this was a good opportunity to use Eclipse, the Java-and-more IDE which has caught my eye for a long time. I spent a good part of Sunday using it to start and work on this collaborative project. We are both very impressed with it. Even its support for CVS is tremendous. And performance was great, it certainly didn't feel like a Java application... it felt like an application that was doing all it could to provide me with as much information as possible at all times.

The one thing that bugged me was the text editor. Double-clicking on whitespace didn't select the whitespace, triple-clicking didn't select the line. That really drove me nuts. In general, I'm so used to the behaviours of the Cocoa text system that I was uncomfortable. Thankfully I can customize the keybindings, but I couldn't find a way to make the double/triple-click worked like I wanted.

Eclipse is so good, however, that I can put that aside and build up new editing habits to use it. I have high hopes for Xcode as a replacement IDE for Cocoa/ObjC projects, but I seriously doubt its support for Java will come close to this. I'd love to be wrong there but I'm not holding my breath.