Eclipse vs. Visual Studio: What are the features in Eclipse that are not present in Visual Studio and vice versa?

Question

I keep hearing Eclipse is better than or way ahead of Visual Studio but when I installed Eclipse I felt it is very clunky and hard to use interface. So I want to know what is so great about Eclipse and if there are others who agree with me.

I also could not find a similar question that talks about the specific features about Eclipse and their comparison to Visual Studio.

Solution 1

Last time I tried Eclipse (about a year ago), I found it to be dog slow. Autocomplete would take multiple seconds to bring up the list of possible matches, for instance. Other elements of the UI were also poorly responsive.

Solution 2

Well, I have been working with Visual Studio for a some looong time now :-) I have touched Eclipse ONCE long time ago.

and now...things changed in my head like a couple of weeks ago when I started developing a project for Android mobile platform..tell you what.... ECLIPSE IS BETTER yes..I've said it.

Don't get me wrong. I still love Visual Studio , I've developed many programs using it and it always will be my first love. HOWEVER.... automatic code generation in Eclipse MANY MANY GOOD HINTS it gives you while writing the code.. to place try's, make List not generic but type defined, etc.. analysing your includes ALL THE TIME and eliminating the ones that are not needed anymore, for example I've defined a private FLOAT variable of a class, made a constructor and all the Setters and getters AUTOMATICALLY just by pressing an option in a menu, when I've executed the constructor with a number of precision too high for a float type it automatically suggested changing the private type to double and done all the changes including return types etc:)

ECLIPSE is more like a programmer's companion than a dull REGEX based environment.

Solution 3

I just switched back to Visual Studio (was forced to) from 5 years of Eclipse (and Java), so I can make a list of what I miss in it:

• Ctrl + Shift + T (Search a class)
• Ctrl + O (search the functions of the current class)
• Ctrl + right click on a variable/type/etc to go to its definition
• Show type hierarchy of a class
• Ctrl + Click on a function and go to its definition or one of its overriding functions

And the list goes on and on (refactoring in Eclipse is really good, you have lots of plugins like eclEmma, findBugs, etc).

I just find VS frustrating to navigate in the code, especially with large projects. But maybe I just did not found these features in VS yet?

Solution 4

There are always things in one development environment that aren't in another, but at the end of the day it comes down to two things. 1) What one you prefer to use. 2) What one you can afford. Eclipse is free which is a very big feature for a lot of people.

You have them both installed so why don't you try one for a little bit, and then try the other for a little bit and make up your own mind. I can tell you what people will tell you is better.

If they use VS they will tell you VS is better, and if they use Eclipse they'll tell you that Eclipse is better.

Solution 5

@user168715 - There are a number of things that you can do to make Eclipse slower/faster:

• If you don't give Eclipse enough memory it will be slower. It will spend a lot of time garbage collecting, and will continually be throwing out the cached information that would otherwise speed things up. These combine to make the UI sluggish.

• If you run Eclipse on a project stored in a network mounted file system, it will be slower.

• If you launch Eclipse from a network mounted installation it will be slower.

• If you have lots of large projects open, Eclipse will be slower. This is largely due to the increased memory footprint needed to cache the method signatures etc used for things such as auto-completion.

• If you run Eclipse on Windows, it will be slower than running on Linux/UNIX for the same hardware configuration. Linux/UNIX has more performant file systems, file system caches and virtual memory managers than Windows. And for a 32 bit platform, Linux can give the JVM more memory than Windows can.

EDIT - I notice that @ssahmed555's experience contradicts my last point ... but this is my experience.

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Comments

[Srikar Doddi]

Any other features? options in the menu that make it distinct?

[user168715]

Autocomplete doesn't kick in unless I pause for a moment while I'm typing; this behavior is quite desirable. What I'm talking about is that autocomplete would trigger, then take several seconds to search/render/etc, during which time any typing I do won't show up until several seconds have elapsed.

[Brad Gardner]

Ah, I haven't experienced the same with the newest iterations of eclipse, but I think I've seen it before. The auto-complete in Visual Studio is definitely faster once its up and going.

[ssahmed555]

Based on my admittedly limited experience with Eclipse... it may be cross-platform but it appears to run best on Windows only! Trying to run Eclipse on Linux, especially 64-bit versions, has been a tremendous challenge to put it lightly. I've tried multiple times on multiple different 64-bit Linux distros, but in the end I've gone with Netbeans on Linux as it Just Works(TM). Eclipse on Windows, however, has fewer problems.

[ssahmed555]

If you try the latest Eclipse 3.5, I think you will be pleasantly surprised. Current versions of Eclipse are very, very good.

[Kasper Holdum]

Both features are easily available in VS. You can auto format several formats such as VB, C#, Xml, Html, Javascript and so forth.

[Piotr]

Yeah I know I can format code in VS, I just said it wasn't working as good (at least back then). And if it comes to the "find type" feature can you tell me how to do this in VS?

[gerdemb]

Strange. Obviously YMMV, but I've never had any problems doing Java development in Linux with Eclipse. Works the same way is it does on my Windows box....

[Justin Ethier]

It's sad that the accepted answer for features of Eclipse that are missing is "it runs much slower"...

[oxbow_lakes]

Sad because it's true, or sad because it's false?

[alternative]

Why do you want a non-monospace font?

[Peteter]

I've been using Eclipse and VS in parallell for several years. Both are fast/slow on different parts and on different sizes of projects. The question is about festures...

[Hucker]

VS has free editions that are very useful.

[nowaq]

Uncle Bob Martin once said "Resharper is a tool which makes Visual Studio almost usable". After working with Eclipse and VS for a couple of years I must say that I totally agree!

[Pupper]

You can right click on a function/variable/etc and select 'Go To Definition' to view its definition. Not sure about others.

[hbhakhra]

This should be the best answer. @Ben Just resolved an unresolved question

[Stephen C]

@oxbow_lakes - or sad that it was accepted?

[Scott Rippey]

I too wish Visual Studio had these things. And then I tried Resharper. And my life was changed forever.

[stepanian]

The auto-complete speed in Eclipse is configurable. The default setting is slow because that's what people prefer.

[stepanian]

@ssahmed555: My experience is Eclipse runs on Linux as fast as, if not faster than, Windows with no issues at all.

[Ehryk]

Agreed @ScottRippey. To clarify, ReSharper adds all these features, and tons more.

[Robert Koritnik]

@200: Or Ctrl+click it for that matter...

[Dejan Stuparic]

ReSharper is great for that kind of things, when I first installed it was like completely different experience, VS became great tool again.

[Dejan Stuparic]

First they should port .NET to linux, and nobody develops on Mac anyway...

[GravityWell]

@Ehryk: So you're saying a very expensive commercial Windows only app (Visual Studio) plus a commercial plugin together are close to the multi-platform, free, and open source Eclipse?

[Etherealone]

@oxbow_lakes sad because the question is "what do you have in your hands?", the answer is "I run slow."

[rfcoder89]

@Dejan its a shame you have to pay more money to give it features which should be included in the first place.

[Jimbali]

Eclipse is set by default to pause before showing autocomplete options (500 ms maybe). This can be changed in the preferences.

[JBone]

In VS press F12 to go to definition

[TtT23]

It is year 2013 and this is still true. If only supported indexing like IntelliJ...

[afrish]

Here is another comparison that not only proves your point, but goes much beyond that: jmonkeycoder.wordpress.com/2013/08/28/eclipse-vs-visual-stud‌​io

[afrish]

Eclipse 4.2 was the only version to be really slow. Come on guys, are you serious? Can't you just give it 1 GB of memory in eclipse.ini? Believe me, it is working like a charm, no slowness at all. Just grab 3.8 or a newest 4.3 and you'll be fine. It only starts a bit slow, but I do a restart less than one time every two weeks. Yes, it is 2013, and Eclipse is still fast.

[Ouadie]

geekswithblogs.net/cyberycon/archive/2011/05/01/…

[luis.espinal]

That doesn't make any sense. Why would you interact Eclipse with Tomcat (or any AS for that matter)? Of course it's going to be unpredictable as you are interacting with an external process. My take has always been to keep a command console from where to deploy/redeploy/undeploy stuff, with Eclipse for editing and building.

[Robert Noack]

@nucleo I started reading that blog until I realized that it's not accurate. Got to the line that says "VS: ONE Run Configuration and ONE Debug Configuration" - this simply is not true. You can have as many as you want in VS as well. So I don't know what else I should/should not trust about this blog entry since the person writing it clearly does not know all the facts.

[Steam]

I began with Eclipse (Java) and now I just started using VS for C#. When you add a JAR in Eclipse, its simply added. But, in VS 2008, if you add a reference to your project successfully, it does not actually get added until you do "save all". This is strange. What's even more odd that ctrl + S is not save all. Ctrl + shift + S is save all. What could be the reason for this ? I wonder if I am missing something. Looks like a case of bad design to me.

[Steam]

Looked at this link - jmonkeycoder.wordpress.com/2013/08/28/eclipse-vs-visual-stud‌​io The last paragraph is the icing on the cake - Now the question is: how in the hell is it possible that one of the largest corporations in the world with so much money cannot even come close to free open source product that is developed by community? Does it mean Microsoft just CAN’T do more? Even if it had unlimited money and resources? Does it mean that Microsoft just doesn’t care, if the cashflow goes on anyway?

[Arithmomaniac]

CodeRush XPress is free, if you want to save money vs ReSharper go.devexpress.com/CodeRushX.aspx

[Arturas M]

@oxbow_lakes sad because it doesn't sum up the experience with eclipse. It might be slow and sluggish at times, although the newest version seems to be working faster, but it's not about the speed of the IDE, it's about how fast and productive are you by using that IDE. And I am somehow 100% sure that Eclipse is way ahead of anything else out there at the moment. Also it takes a long time to learn to use it that well. But once it's mastered there's nothing better, you are just amazed at how good and comfortable it's built. If you code just sometimes, then use Visual Studio...

[user3141326]

For Ctrl+Shift+T you can have this with Resharper Ctrl+T

[Pavel]

"If you don't give it enough memory", even right now, 5 years later, eclipse uses 3-4 times as much ram as visual studio. But I agree that java applications work much slower on windows, i tried eclipse and intellij on ubuntu, and it felt like upgrading to an ssd. Too bad ubuntu itself is buggy. :/