Re: OT: Eclipse Additions

[Stuart Ballard]

On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 09:25:36 -0500, Andrew Overholt <address@hidden> wrote:
> What kind of changes to
> existing aspects of Eclipse would make things easier for you?

I've only ever used Eclipse on Windows to date, but my day job
involves working in Visual Studio .NET and there are two things that
bother me every time I'm forced to use Eclipse. These are showstoppers
for me, although I expect they'd be hard to fix at a Red Hat level
(they seem pretty fundamental architectural issues rather than
superficial feature additions).

The first is the couple-of-second delay before the autocomplete
dropdown appears. In VS.NET this is instantaneous (it's visible by the
time your finger lifts up from the "." key) and the difference in
usability and productivity is *very* noticeable. VS.NET's
instantaneous autocomplete dropdown makes it a useful tool for
learning an API or refreshing your memory on something you aren't sure
of the name of (you don't appreciate how useful this actually is until
you get used to working in an environment that does it); in Eclipse
the delay makes this far too painful to do on a regular basis - for
me, at least.

The second is Eclipse's annoying habit of inserting close-parens and
close-braces automatically. The behavior of these runs so counter to
ordinary intuition that I constantly end up with extra or missing
parens because I intuitively go to re-type them. Obviously some effort
was made to ignore manually-typed close parens when you're in front of
one of the automatically added ones, but whatever heuristic is used is
wrong enough of the time to be very painful.

I know these are hard to fix, but hey, you asked ;)

Stuart.
-- 
http://sab39.dev.netreach.com/