Eclipse : The God of IDE's

I have found the IDE of my dreams!

I was using and learning Eclipse for the past one week. I had been using the Visual Studio IDE before that. I really don't think I am ever going to go back to using VS. Its just not good enough after seeing Eclipse.

A little background information about Eclipse... Eclipse is a general purpose IDE written in Java. Therefore it is compatible across all platforms that support Java. For me this primarily means Windows and Linux. but it can be used on Solaris, AIX, Mac, and others too.

So what's so great about a cross platform IDE you ask?
How about the capability to support any language using plugins? How about the existing standard plugins for C/C++ (CDT) and Java? How about support for any sort of debugger that you can possibly imagine? How about code colouring and code folding? How about hover help and something that would be called "Intellisense" if that name wasn't trademarked by M$? How about the fact that it doesn't touch the Windows registry? How about the fact that installation means extraction from a zip file?

How about the fact that its FREE as in freedom?

Ok... enough shameless advertising for Eclipse... I am not selling it to anyone anyway. Try it. If you find it useful, use it... Otherwise, forget it.

So what all did I do? I first tried Eclipse on windows. Went off to www.eclipse.org and downloaded 3.0.1 and CDT 2.1.0. Unzipped it into my file system. Thats all. No installation sequence. What about running it? See that little file named "eclipse.exe"? Double clicked it... Voila! Its up and running!

Disclaimer: I already had a JRE on my system... So I cant really say "Thats all it takes, folks!"... I haven't tried a fresh install on a machine without a JRE.

Eclipse has a nice soft look. It is different from VS in its terminology and widget structure... Reminds me vaguely of the VS.NET 2005 UI. Its startup is painfully slow...but once thats thru, everything is spiffy. It discovers all the plugins on its own, and loads them up into its UI.

Being the typical geek I am, I didn't bother to RTFM. Just plunged into the UI to get my hands dirty.
Needless to say, they got wet, slippery, and disgusting within about five minutes. I was so cheesed off that I closed Eclipse and deleted the eclipse folder! 15 minutes and a chocolate bar later, I had unpacked it out again. This time however, I started reading TFM.

After the usual intro's and why's and what for's, I started reading about CDT and how to use it. In just a few minutes, I was able to igure out how to create a simple hello world program and run it.

Mind you, there are a lot of things that the Eclipse help assumes that you already know about : Like what exactly is "make" and how to write a makefile and other such moderatly advanced things. Its not for the first time coder.

It also doesnt give you a clue that there is no inbuilt gcc! Or gdb... but then.. Once you start working on Eclipse, you realize that it doesnt matter - You can modify the makefiles to use the VC compiler cl instead... and use nmake instead of make. I havent yet figured out how to invoke the VC debuger... but thats because of a different reason - I didnt have to.

One of my first realizations as I started up with Eclipse was that it assumed the existance of GCC and GDB. Now how am I supposed to get that in Windows?....

Hey! Wait a minute! There's Cygwin!!!

Ok... So I have that installed... Then I fire up cygwin bash. Set up a mount point to speed up my reaching eclipse. And start eclipse. Does it pick up gcc and gdb? EUREKA !!! It does!

Now what? How about another chocolate, a bunch of woohoos and figuring out how to write a real program - not that silly old hello world?
Ok... Just as soon as I finish gushing over it in my blog!

First Post!!

This is my first time writing a blog ever.... No more a virgin to blogging will I be... (Sounded kinda like Yoda, didnt I?)

What do i write here? Something interesting? Something inspiring?

Actually as I think about it, I'd like every programmer to read "Free as in freedom" at least once. At least the first chapter.
What the hell, I'd like every business man to read it. I'd like all the lawyers and the patent crazy people to read it.

I dont think that RMS is the living legend he is presented in the book. But the thoughts behind his fanatic behaviour are sound enough to be listened to... and maybe even followed.

Anyways, enough for now... Read it if you care.