Must Buy Eclipse Book

Eclipse has a ‘guess the button’ user interface.

–James Noble

I’m working up some JUnit examples and figuring I’ll just use Eclipse for the example code and labs, but of course big, bad, horrible interface Eclipse nips up and bites me.

It is so easy to get lost in the interface in wizard and button hell. I spent an hour trying to figure out why I couldn’t run a unit test. Turned out I had checked out the project from CVS (CVS > Checkout Projects from CVS), but I didn’t then create a new java project using the Java Project Wizard so I had a project that I thought was a Java project, but actually didn’t have any language specific features. The worst part is it’s so easy to do.

I remember now why I bought Eclipse in Action soon after playing with it back on my old Ti Powerbook. I suppose if I spent a lot of time in it the nasty interface issues would fade away to some extent, but why do I have to go through the hell.

End of rant, must get sleep. And, yes, I’m an IntelliJ IDEA fan.