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Re: [ide-dev] Java IDEs comparison

Copying the UX group as this crossed into determining what the user experience should be.

From: <ide-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: Discussions about the IDE <ide-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thursday, September 22, 2016 at 1:30 PM
To: "ide-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx" <ide-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [ide-dev] Java IDEs comparison

On 09/14/2016 12:31 AM, Patrik Suzzi wrote:
Hi All,

I just read a post entitled "The fall of Eclipse" -
http://movingfulcrum.com/the-fall-of-eclipse/.
Back to the troll, here is a Reddit discussion on this topic:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/52mcf3/the_fall_of_eclipse/d7m4ql6
https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/53gmzq/the_fall_of_eclipse/
with a nice bashing of the stats and conclusion of the blog post, and an interesting link to another survery: http://www.baeldung.com/java-ides-2016

Reading the comments, many mention the workspace as an issue. They don't complain with the concept of IntelliJ "projects" which is equivalent.
What's usually blamed is that preferences are not stored globally. Oomph preference recorder already has it fixed, right?

While the preference recorder is a clever way to work around the problem, I’m not sure it’s what users are expecting. At least the version I saw of it, it should be recording all preferences without asking the user because as soon as you ask, the smart users realize it’s a workaround, the beginner users wonder why it’s asking.

We really should be storing workspace preferences globally. Then if you’re a super advanced user who wants different preferences per workspace, we can come up with a workaround for that.

If Oomph can do that, then great, but then we need to make sure all Eclipse IDEs (at eclipse and elsewhere) have Oomph in it. That is, it should be in the Platform.


I also believe that the old habit of using multiple workspaces is something that confuses users and hide the power of Eclipse. Keeping a single workspace is often simpler, and you really can have hundreds of projects open simultaneously for different languages. What could we do to "educate" existing users to not care about workspaces and always work in the same one?

Not sure that’s the right direction. Visual Studio Code, for example does have the concept of multiple “workspaces”. You open it up in a root directory and have have multiple instances of it open at different roots. Visual Studio has the concept of Solution which is similar. Xcode, mind you, does not and you open and close projects.

The main problem here is that java projects tend to be small and numerous and there’s just too much noise if you have your IDE checked out (like I do with Momentic’s 400 projects or so from all over the Eclipse ecosystem) and then want to work with an Android app project for example which would get lost in the noise.

But yes, workspaces are a problem it would be nice to understand the root cause of those user experience problems so we can come up with something really better.


--
Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer for Red Hat Developers
My blog - My Tweets

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