Related to my other thread about an Android application, Eclipse is the preferred IDE for Android development. I've never really used it before. It seems … okay.

But the thing that bothered me about it most is the horrible builtin editor. It's the most mouse-driven editor I've seen in quite some time. I finally figured out some useful keyboard shortcuts, but they were minimal: things like merely going to the end of the line, etc.

Then I argued with getting eclim to work, but it's basically unsupported under MacOS. (You can use a "headless" Eclipse and work totally within Vim, but I really needed the Eclipse help for the Android development, and trying to figure out how to do Android development while using a nonstandard environment would have been less that beneficial.)

Finally I came across vrapper. Which is just a set of vi-like keybindings for the normal Eclipse editor. I figured that it wouldn't be all that good, but was bound to be better than the crap that Eclipse gives us by default. Once I'd installed it, though, I found that I'd underestimated the developer. It's actually really good. Not to imply that it's 100% complete. It's not. (There doesn't seem to be any facility to do search and replace, or external filters, for example.) But that stuff barely exists for the regular editor.

So, if you're forced into using Eclipse, and you want a better editor, I'd suggest that you forgo trying to make eclim work, and first see if vrapper is good enough for you. It is for me, at the moment. I can at least move around in a text file with some vague sense of dispatch again. I wish I'd found it sooner.

If you can stand to shell out dollars, you might want to give SlickEdit Core for Eclipse a try (along with SlickEdit). It is the only editor I've tried with vi-like key bindings that aren't just a pale imitation. It actually doesn't suck, and the integration is very well done. If I were forced to use an IDE, it would be this one.

On a side note, the guy who showed me slick edit said "I like an IDE because vim doesn't have word/symbol completion." So I opened it up, and said "like this?" "Oh," he said, and left my cube.

Haha. Yeah. Vim is amazing.

I tried SlickEdit's vi mode once a while back and was unimpressed. It's been nearly ten years, though. I can stand to shell out dollars, but I have no desire to for this, especially $100. Per year. And they don't offer it for MacOS, either. I suspect that they're running into the same problems with Eclipse plugins under MacOS that the eclim guys are.

As a complete tangent, SlickEdit is about 5 miles from my office, so I definitely don't want to denigrate hometown boys. (Well, as hometown as most people are in RTP, anyway.)