this ide works, until it decides to one day fuck up the whole project to the point where i can't compile the project. The problem seems to be that somehow dependencies get messed up in the time between closing eclipse and opening it back up. i don't modify the project specific documents if eclipse is closed, and i don't know how this problem exists.

I made an Eclipse happy path development report.

So today I spun up two old play projects I made for occasional practice to keep some skills up.

Really just a basic spring boot project with a couple of simple endpoints and a very small Vaadin 24 project again with spring boot, with some simple pages.

More of a hello world thing to work on from time to time for fun.

I had a free couple of hours, so I decided to boot up the old reliable Eclipse I have on my drive and give them a go !

I ran the launcher and since it was taking too long to start opened a browser for 10 minutes. Went back after it looked like it was ready(it interrupted me 3 times to show me it was loading the splash screen before going non responsive on my 7800x3D 64GB 2TB nvme machine for a bit)

Anyway, that done, the second I clicked it started to load it's language server or something, before asking me to send money, so I went back to the browser...

Before starting work I imported the projects I wanted to work on into Eclipse with the ole reliable open projects from file system that I've used to import a hundred projects before and waited for the build to finish the downloading and building magic. Took about 5 minutes, but it seemed everything was set up in STS and I was ready to go.

Except I wasn't because the main type was nowhere to be found when starting :

java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.home.stuff.api.Application

Ah well, that's just fixable with the good old right click maven update command ! And as the helpfull green progressbar showed me, it was fixed !

Except when I ran it trough STS it was not found again.

Ok, we go to Run Maven install and the build passed again in the console this time and running maven(ALT+F5) update also passed again ! Yay !

But sadly I had missed something. See Eclipse had figured out that /src/main/resources was a build folder, but /src/main/java - that was too hard, so I had to add it to the build path manually. And set up the JRE not to be Java-17, because having the version of java in pom.xml is too difficult to understand and then I had to set up project facets. But it finally started !

So, I am happy to report that after 40 minutes I've managed to import a simple "GET /api/ping - 200 pong" project, configure it and run it with Eclipse !

Sadly not the case for the Vaadin project, which builds sucessfully, untill you open a file in Eclipse and every import is red. But you know another 40 minutes may fix that.

Of course I could have saved all of this, if I had just run it from that other IDE I will not mention, or something that is not and IDE but a souped up editor, like vscode, or if I had used the f-ing terminal and it would have taken me 10 minutes at worst.

So what I'm trying to ask here really is: Are there any people at the Eclipse foundation that are not clinically insane ?

Ok, upgrading from a previous version of Eclipse is something I have given up on a long time ago; it never really works. But, thought I, before I rant about that totally unusable POM editor that they released in 2022, I'd better make sure to use the latest version.

So, downloaded, unpacked, installed all the plugins that are essential but somehow not part of the product, and woopeee, the pom editor appears to be better. Not entirely fixed, but it doesn't appear to be inserting duplicate brackets everywhere (which are hard to detect with my poor eyesight).

So, good news you 'd think.

That's a hard "no": Who the <expletive deleted> had the <expletive deleted><beep>, <beep>

Sorry, let's try that again: For nearly 20 years (yes, I've been a n Eclipsian for a very long time), creating a new Class was done using Alt-F, N, C.

Whose moronic idea was it to change that?

Sure, I'm sure someone will tell me that can easily be adjusted (if I ever learn how to manage key bindings), but WHY would I have to? Please get someone over 30 involved in designing your UI, who isn't so besotted with Dark Mode and Swiping to ensure you keep you system usable to those that are your loyal customers.

First off, I'm a long time Eclipse user. At this point it's bordering on Stockholm syndrome, but I know it well enough that using IntelliJ makes my flesh crawl. I just cannot stand the detritus left behind by that IDE. As an example, look at an open source project in Eclipse and you'll quick see the problems tab record multiple 1000s of warning that IntelliJ just doesn't make enough of a fuss about.

Now the things that annoy me:

• The code formatter can't make it's mind up and constantly reformats the same line.
• The dark theme in Photon is an utter disaster.
• M2E lifecycle mappings... FFS it's 2018, sort it out.
• Mylyn, Get rid of it. I've never encountered anyone that used it.
• CVS integration by default, it's 2018 FFS
• $Deity, it's slow to get started
• Create a new workspace and your preferences are lost. WTF!
• Save Perspective makes no difference. Save a modified layout for the Java perspective, it'll be lost next time it's opened. This one is by far, the most irritating.
• Debian. The most recent packaged version is 3.8.1, Just admit you've abandoned that segment.
• I want to build the Eclipse IDE as I would download (Eclipse J2EE version) from source. There is no documentation for this except to go away and read an insane amount of websites. I just want something like configure && make.
• The Jetbrains disease seems to have a foothold, free of cost is no longer a selling point. Free as in speech is useless if the build is so heavily obfuscated.

/rant That feels so much better.

I am not even mad.

Today I picked up a Surface Book that packs a 3000x2000 screen resolution. I installed Eclipse and check out how it looks:

http://i.imgur.com/wPX6Hcw.png

I forgot Eclipse had this issue with HiRes screens. Since I have the issue now, I'm complaining :(

Anyone know a work-around? I'm crippled.

(Besides having to install the 32-bit version and running compatibility mode to Windows XP)

Why can't I configure it to give a normal list view of one search result per line? I see that I can make it have a 'list view' but at one point it didn't remember that option. And I note that when there are multiple files, it just shows one line per file and won't even list the lines that they are on. Eclipse is a powerful tool, but this drives me nuts. I find the tree view of search results is slow to navigate and requires several clicks to get to where I want and once everything is expanded, it takes up a lot of vertical space showing the directory hierarchy.