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On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 5:12 PM, David Given <dg@cowlark.com> wrote:
>  I normally develop on Eclipse. But I don't use it as an IDE, I use it as
>  a super editor and SVN client. Right now I bring it up concurrently with
>  Visual Studio so I can use it for all the things VS is dire at, like
>  file management.

It is indeed a dog, although not bad for its era - this is decade-old software!

One strong point about open source tools that isn't often emphasized
is that they are conservative in the best possible way. Things like
SciTE, Lua, GCC, GDB, etc don't change very much, they focus on their
job and tend to get better.  Whereas if you were working in the tools
division of MS I expect you would be under a lot of pressure to pile
on the features and eye candy, in order to keep the upgrade cycle
flowing. Add to this MS' tendency to get bored with their toys, and
the result is not a thing of beauty.

Eclipse is big, but is actually suprisingly elegant. The Java
integration is incredible, although it seems to be a dog at C/C++, at
least relatively.

Personally, I don't do Visual Studio anymore, except when I have to
maintain old MFC applications, which is a miserable experience.  A
good editor and the GNU toolchain is still the best driving
experience.  But I am glad that I no longer have to use Emacs for the
GDB integration - my personal symbol table is too small for all those
shortcuts ;)

steve d.