When I first started trying out Java coding, I found it rather annoying. I was using vi and command line builds. I find that java takes a long time to compile compared to C and such, and hence it was a tedious and time consuming endeavour. Later, Matt Tucker introduced me to IntelliJ's IDEA (lots of people refer to it as IDEA, I refer to it as IntelliJ). At first I found it a beast and was resistent to it (being that my only IDE experience had been Visual Studio), but soon I began to adore it. I love the autocompletion, I like the automatic catching of compile bugs and such before even going to compile, and overall it made Java fun for me. In fact it make me actually wish I had a good IDE for Python at the time (I was working on PyAIMt and PyICQt at the time).

I'd heard of Eclipse, but I had not really used it before. I tried it once and couldn't figure out how to open a project and in general nothing about it made sense to me. I decided "why waste my time on this". Then came Flex Builder. As you may or may not now, Eclipse based. It's kind of like Eclipse with a lot of the cooler options in Eclipse stripped out. Generally I feel like it keeps getting in my way. Lots of keystrokes don't do what I want them to, in fact I can't -find- keystrokes to do what I want in a lot of cases. It seemed like autocompletion was a little "off". It wasn't as awesome as IntelliJs. It didn't always seem to work at all. Often I'd hit ., wait for a completion to come up, nothing, delete, try again, repeat until it really worked. Now, with so many people enjoying Eclipse, I began to wonder why. First off, IntelliJ ain't free, but it is for open source projects. It's also waaaaay bigger in terms of resource usage. So that might be one reason, IntelliJ is not easily accessible to everyone. But I figured, maybe Flex Builder is giving me a warped perception of it. I'd gotten some friends from work to walk me through some simple things like "opening an existing project" and such, so I know what to do at this point. =)

So at this point, I figured I want to give Eclipse a real try. I know it's less resource intensive. I decided I'd like to write down what I "require" my IDE to do at this point for me to like it and after I play with it some, see if it measures up to my pickiness:

• autocompletion of methods on classes, with it displaying args for the methods in the drop down box
• hungry backspace (if I hit delete I like it to wipe all of the whitespace in my way and get me back to something that's real content)
• instant evaluation of errors without having to compile first, ideally including warnings for things that "could be better" and "you realize you didn't set this variable to anything, right?"
• subversion integration, display of updated files compared to latest SVN checkout, easy commit of SVN files from IDE including picking and choosing what gets committed

Is that asking too much? Maybe. LOL I'm spoiled by IntelliJ. But I'm optimistic to give Eclipse a try and see how it feels, and if there are plugins to get what I want out of it. Would I switch to it as my primary IDE? Well who knows actually. This isn't necessarily an experiment to switch, but an experiment to see if I can learn to appreciate. =)