I’m live blogging the What sucks about Eclipse panel. I’m trying to provide answers to the various questions asked as they come in. Sorry if I don’t get everything 🙂
- Why doesn’t Eclipse support nested projects?
- Some backward compatibility issues…
- Why doesn’t Eclipse support word wrapping?
- There was a Google Summer of Code project out of Eclipse that tried to tackle this enhancement. I’m sure the bug is open to contributions.
- Why doesn’t Eclipse support macro recording?
- Why is it so hard to work with actions?
- Paul Webster has done a lot of good work in this area about the new command infrastructure. He gave a talk at EclipseCon about it.
- Why is Eclipse UI’s look and feel lagging behind?
- Not conclusive what exactly is lagging…
- Why is there no first class Subversion support in Eclipse?
- Subversive and Subclipse are the current options. There is a project proposal currently… there is a newsgroup out there also for people to participate. Apparently, the Eclipse project has excellent turnaround time and the Subversive project proposal has been approved.
- Why is it so hard to find out what new things installed actually do? How do you discover new functionality?
- We need to connect the existing Welcome framework with new features that are installed. Users need to be aware of what goes in. Looks like the frameworks are there, they just need to be connected.
- Why is GEF so hard to work with the existent editor infrastructure?
- Why can’t PDE Build (or Eclipse in general) provide native installers out of box? That is, provide a Mac installer, Windows installer, RPM, etc…
- There is the new provisioning work going on… there is the Eclipse packaging project… and there is the new Maya proposal.
- Why does every project like PDE, Ant, ATF, WTP, etc… have different XML editors?
- Why do editors and views have to be different and so hard to have an XML view (using the existing editor infrastructure)?
- Why are there modal dialogs in Eclipse like the launch configuration?
- How do we make Eclipse so new users aren’t overwhelmed?
- Capabilities are around to help… but no-one uses it…
- Why doesn’t Eclipse have a good free visual editor…