Epic Battle: Eclipse vs NetBeans

Published on Jul 17, 2009

See Round Two of this battle: Eclipse vs NetBeans: Round 2. (It's better)

It's been an ongoing struggle between the developers at our company of what IDE is the best. We have had guys who swear by Eclipse, TextMate, NetBeans and vim. I originally started programming in e (a TextMate clone for Windows) and then moved onto Eclipse, where I have stayed for years. Just as soon as I thought I had won all developers over to Eclipse, Zach Wood goes and does this to me.

He was the last guy holding out on the war and religiously swore by TextMate and then last week decided he was going to jump to NetBeans (for whatever reason). Of course, this week he challenged me this week to trying it out. His main complaint, which I do not agree with, is that Eclipse is, "Too difficult to configure." Yeah, bogus.

At any rate, I've given it this week in development. There's a few things that I really don't like about it:

It practically crashes my computer when I add pre-existing (and large) new projects.
Features feel clunkier than Eclipse.
Color profiles are super hard to configure. This inheritance crap screws up left and right.

Those are my biggest complaints. I haven't had time to setup any plugins yet, but generally things are acceptable. I think I may enjoy using NetBeans, but I'm still holding my reserve on this one. I'll include my color profile at a later date once I figure it out better. Perhaps if you know the secret to unlocking this mystical part of the application, you could help me out.

Comments

Rabbit (not verified) says:

Published on Jul 18, 2009 @ 16:46pm

I've never been completely happy with any editor.

Back in the day, it was PHPEdit (by WaterProof software). If I still used Windows, that is probably the editor I would use. I moved over to E (Win) and TextMate (Mac) because I really liked how easy on the eyes the interface was but ultimately I really missed out on a lot of features.

I've tried Eclipse and NetBeans and I'm not happy with either.

There just hasn't been a single editor that has had that perfect balance between interface simplicity, beautiful fonts, and important editor features (I really don't need a PHP debugger or even version control, I have other really great software to handle that).

Eclipse vs NetBeans: Round 2 « Rob’s Blog | Purple Rock Scis (not verified) says:

Published on Aug 14, 2009 @ 08:36am

[...] been a solid month since my very opinionated, rushed and for the most part useless post on Eclipse vs NetBeans. Zach was kind enough to criticize me left and right about the blog post as [...]

juani (not verified) says:

Published on Nov 15, 2009 @ 05:42am

Eclipse is a pain to setup. It has the most difficult hello world in the industry. I've set it up like three times (for three different stuff), and it was a whole evening.

Netbeans ha some annoying features like marking a line as an error before I have time to finish the line, but you can have a window with a Hello World label and a button in a fuss just following your intuition.

I'm giving them a chance for their refactoring tools, but gedit or scite or kate or geany or vim and ddd for debugging are

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rob Zienert

I was blessed with being born into a tech-savvy family: my dad being a vehicle engineer at Ford and my mom a database programmer — it only made sense that I put my genetic inheritance to good use, so here I am. Whether it be application architecture, code reviews, or any flavor of voodoo-techno-whizbang; its my job to make sure your application or web site functions technically.

Outside of the office, I have the pleasure of serving on the Program Advisory Committee for Full Sail University’s Web Design and Development Bachelor Program. But alas, not all I do is work, oh-no. I’m super passionate about fast, sexy cars (and bikes), painting, coffee, watching the History channel, and playing paintball. I also play a lot of Modern Warfare 2 on XBox (Gamertag: Pievendor).

Oh! How could I forget: My nickname around town is RZA, like the rapper, because I’m so convincingly street.