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So, I'm finally taking the plunge to using eclipse from vim ... but I'm having some serious issues getting over the incredibly cluttered interface and menu system. Example: right clicking in the main text area yields a submenu with ~30 items... The whole eclipse environment seems cumbersome and rather ugly.

I've painstakingly changed the fonts and colors, and it bothers me that the settings are peppered throughout the entire settings window. I wish there existed color scheme quick setups like both emacs and vim have had for decades. Through stackoverflow I found:

http://blog.codefront.net/2006/09/28/vibrant-ink-textmate-theme-for-eclipse/

But, I would love some more examples! Something like torte or slate.

Does anyone have the secret of making eclipse a more usable tool with a more aesthetically pleasing interface?

Dan Olson
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Ralphleon
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  • I found setting color themes to be nightmarish in Eclipse. I think Eclipse grows like kudzu and never gets pruned to anything sensible. – Nosredna Jul 12 '09 at 02:16
  • A long time of getting used to it makes it very usefull ;) – Janusz Jul 12 '09 at 02:20
  • Man, if you like that "Vibrant Ink" thing, then you're not fit to comment on aesthetic issues. Ugh. – Paul Tomblin Jul 12 '09 at 02:24
  • @Paul If I liked it, why would I be looking for more? ;) – Ralphleon Jul 12 '09 at 02:28
  • Also, I'm not a fan of the Vim plugin for eclipse... – Ralphleon Jul 12 '09 at 02:45
  • Learn the keybindings, and bind keys to stuff you use. You don't need to see a big popup menu if you can access it with keystrokes - which should be a natural thing from a vim user :-) Also - start coding, and don't worry so much about the interface. Coding > aesthetics. – nos Jul 12 '09 at 03:32

4 Answers4

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Well, if you miss vim so much, and just want the extra eclipse features, have you considered eclim?

The primary goal of eclim is to bring Eclipse functionality to the Vim editor. The initial goal was to provide Eclipse’s java functionality in vim, but support for various other languages (c/c++, php, python, css, html, xml, etc.) have been added and several more are planned.

Eclim is less of an application and more of an integration of two great projects. The first, Vim, is arguably one of the best text editors in existence. The second, Eclipse, provides many great tools for development in various languages. Each provides many features that can increase developer productivity, but both still leave something to be desired. Vim lacks native Java support and many of the advanced features available in Eclipse. Eclipse, on the other hand, still requires the use of the mouse for many things, and when compared to Vim, provides a less than ideal interface for editing text.

That is where eclim comes into play. Instead of trying to write an IDE in Vim or a Vim editor in Eclipse, eclim provides an Eclipse plug-in that exposes Eclipse features through a server interface, and a set of Vim plug-ins that communicate with Eclipse over that interface. This functionality can be leveraged in three primary ways, as illustrated below.

  1. The first scenario is for those for which vim is their primary editing interface. In this scenario you run a headless instance of eclipse which all vim instances can then communicate with to provide the various eclipse features.
  2. The second scenario is for those who prefer using vim as their main interface, but frequently end up jumping back to eclipse for any features not provided by eclim. In this case you can run the eclim server inside of the eclipse gui and then interact with it via external vim instances just like the first scenario.
  3. The last scenario is for those who wish to use the eclipse interface full time, but want to use gvim as an embedded eclipse editor. Just like the previous use case, the eclim server is run inside of the eclipse gui and the embedded gvim will interact with it just like external vim instances would.
Community
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rampion
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  • Have you had any success with this? – Ralphleon Jul 12 '09 at 02:59
  • Not personally. I've had it recommended to me, and I plan to start using it for my next Java project. – rampion Jul 12 '09 at 03:03
  • I tried this a while ago and found that a) it interacts badly with parts of eclipse / plugins which expect the standard editor b) hampers actually learning eclipse. It isn't a very natural fit. – Draemon Jul 03 '11 at 19:43
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If you think the contextual menu of Eclipse is huge, you haven't see that of Eric's xD

The colour schemes aren't that bad, I think you can save your combinations so there shouldn't be a major problem to package your favourites to keep them from one system to another.

And after all, think that most of "normal people" (not geeks grown up with Unices) Vim is just horrible... and Emacs can cause your fingers to dislocate.

fortran
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Do not forget the "maximize" option on the tab of the Editors: very useful if you want to set aside all the "GUI cluttering" introduced by all the other views.
Those views are still accessible through icons on the side, but you can work only in one (or several) editors and focus on them only:

alt text
(source: infosupport.com)

A huge win for me is the way how maximize and minimize now works.
In the past, maximizing an editor would fill out a single editor across the entire screen.
If you are working on a wide-screen monitor, like the one my laptop has, this results in a big amount of white space which is not very useful.
In Eclipse 3.3, tiling editors is preserved when maximized. This makes it easy to place my unit test and code editor next to each other, so I when I am typing tests, I can very easily inspect the code I am testing

Also views are minimized instead of completely hidden.
A lot of people don't even know you can minimize a view, because before Eclipse 3.3, minimizing didn't make much sense. It was completely horizontal oriented, which means it usually just looked weird and wasted space.
When minimized in Eclipse 3.3, views now behave more like "fast views", and always actually do really minimize. This all works out very nice, because there is much less need to switch maximize/restore to look at a view, especially combined with quick access.

Glorfindel
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VonC
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You can change a lot through the plugins... btw what language are you coding in? JAVA? Try Netbeans then..

jle
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