NYCPHP Meetup

[Rob Marscher]

> On 2/8/2010 11:24 AM, Chris Snyder wrote:
>> I share the Eclipse loathing. 
> I don't like Eclipse either.

I've been dealing with Eclipse for several years now (I was working at IBM when they were creating it, so I think that gives me a little affinity towards it).  I like the outline view of my class for navigating it, the task list for grouping my "TODO" notes, quick custom code templates, the tooltips with function definitions, etc.  But I've grown to not be able to live without the "Open Declaration" feature which lets me highlight a method or class name, hit F3, and get right to that file.  With a large project, that has been a huge time saver.  I think NetBeans has something similar?  I remember downloading NetBeans and being a little turned off by it... but I can't remember why now.

Eclipse caps its memory usage and if it's not large enough, it spends a lot of time figuring out how to clear heap space.  I edited my eclipse.ini file and set 
-Xmx1024m
to let it have up to 1GB of memory if it needs it.  That seems to be enough.

I also stopped using any source control integration.  Subversive would just bring my machine to a halt continually.  I wish it worked well, but I'm handy enough with svn on the command line to not really need it.

I also split my large project into several small projects in Eclipse that reference each other.  This has seemed to help with keeping the "building workspace" time to a minimum.  It also lets me keep libraries I don't use much closed.  I found that certain 3rd party libraries with tons of files -- and especially yui from Yahoo -- would kill performance in Eclipse if I kept it as part of my project.

It seems to me that Eclipse PDT is a beast that needs to be kept at bay continually, but is really powerful if tuned to a tolerable level.

-Rob