Does Sublime Text 2 win over Eclipse for Java Development

Question

Hello java evangelists!

I am using Eclipse for Java Development for more than a year now. Eclipse is great in supporting basically everything you can wish from an IDE. But in my perception it never accomplish those tasks perfectly.

I spend a lot of time waiting in front of a spinner because some process is taking all my CPU. The UI is very old fashioned and not intuitive and sluggish. I tried hard, but could not configure a dark theme that satisfies my requirements.

Eclipse is ok, but this is the tool I am working with every single day, it should be better and make more fun!

I occasionally use Sublime Text for scripting languages like python and I appreciate it a lot. Apparently there are a lot of plugins for that lightweight editor that seems to provide the functionality a java developer is used from Eclipse. But I am not sure how mature there are and how well they will work together.

Before spending one day with trying it out, does anybody have experience using Sublime for Java development?

The features I hardly want to miss are:

• quick fix
• code completion
• type hierarchy
• javadoc on hovering
• maven support
• refactoring
• debugger
• type search

Can Sublime Text 2 provide these features and does it worth changing from Eclipse?

Thanks for any help!

Solution 1

I used Sublime Text 2 for development a while ago and I must say... I went crawling back to Eclipse. Sublime Text isn't much of a IDE but more of a editor. It's very good and fast for editing scripts but you will miss some features like:

• Quickfix: Which can save you a lot of time
• Code completion: Sublime has code completion. But it's nowhere near the level of Eclipse. Even with plugins

On a side note: I miss the slick UI of Sublime when working in Eclipse. But Eclipse does it's job very well and that is what counts in the end.

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As of this year (2014) my IDE of choice is IDEA IntelliJ. It is the best IDE for Java development hands down. It has all the features you're interested in and even a dark theme (dracula). Only downside is that it costs a penny, but it's definitely worth it.

Solution 2

You will find these features (and many others) in Netbeans. Perhaps you'll be more comfortable using it; IDEs are always a personal thing.

And to answer your "question", despite not having any experience with the tool you suggest, I can safely say one can easily work with anything, provided he has a properly set up environment - such as the type a well-configured maven project would reside in.