A quick install of the Eclipse-SDK proved more painful than expected, purely because my system-vm was set to Java1.5, which is problematic (at the moment) on gentoo. java-config (the tool used to set the vm for the system, or for a user) appears to be semi-borked on my machine (or I don’t know how to use it properly), because it kept switching back to 1.5 despite the fact that I set it explicity to 1.4. So after removing 1.5, and recompiling (re-emerging) a mass of dependencies, eclipse and the pydev plugin finally installed.

First impressions, after not having looked a the Eclipse 3 platform for a while:

1. NetBeans panelling is -way- more slick than Eclipse. Eclipse seems clunky by comparison — perhaps there is a way to set a “FastView” panel to open on mouse-over like NetBeans, but it wasn’t immediately obvious…?

2. Also because the panelling isn’t as good, the Eclipse screen layout doesn’t work as well unless you have a large screen, I think. I’m running a small widescreen on a laptop (1280 x 800), and the editor interior seems vertically challenged unless you minimise the bottom panel — which wouldn’t be an issue, if it wasn’t for the fact that the UI is designed by touchpad bigots (a majority of window managers are able to put the close, minimise and maximise buttons in a group on a window title-bar, so why does Eclipse have to be different?), so it seems as if more touchpad use is required to perform the same action on Eclipse when compared with NetBeans.

3. The method to add new file filters isn’t obvious to me either

4. Fonts are a lot (in large flashing letters on a billboard somewhere) nicer on Eclipse than on NetBeans. NetBeans is hard to look at after Eclipse. JEdit is generally ghastly as well from the font perspective — both suffering from Java’s traditionally wonderful font management (that’s sarcasm in case it’s not apparent).

5. It seems that the blame for the chunky behaviour of WSAD/RAD (+Linux) should fall squarely on the heads of the IBM teams in charge of corrupting (I mean) enhancing Eclipse, because alone, it’s a lot more responsive, and memory usage is considerably better than NetBeans. Doing nothing, NetBeans sits at about 17-19% memory usage. Eclipse is currently (doing nothing) sitting on 9.7%.

6. I still don’t like the way that most (all?) IDEs force you to work to their project formats — i.e. create a web project, create a simple java project, etc. A simple text editor with plugins you can twist around, to your own liking, seems much more attractive — but I’m probably in the minority.