I am attempting to make the switch from Eclipse to NetBeans, and this is a raw dump of the pros and cons so far during that process. Note that these are not meant to question design decisions behind various NetBeans features; they are simply differences that have made the conversion harder or easier.
Stats
Opteron 150 w/ 2G memory
Ubuntu Linux 6, AMD64
Java 5, x86_64 version
NetBeans 5.5b2
The Bad
I'll start off with the bad, because these are more obvious. It's much harder to list good things, since the "best" features will be those that are intuitive to an Eclipse user and that require no re-learning. Please keep in mind that I'm a rank newbie when it comes to NetBeans, but I'm a pretty solid developer. In other words, if I have trouble with these things, most new users will too. There will be more to come, and I'm willing to discuss these with any of the core NetBeans folks at length.
The list, in the order in which I encountered them this evening:
- Why isn't antialiasing turned on by default, and why is it a bit hard to find? I don't think of this as an editor setting...I want antialiasing on everywhere. To be honest, I don't understand why this is even a setting. Why would I choose the "make everything uglier" option?
- SVN should be available in the default install. Perhaps I'm biased because I need it, but I really, really loathe having to install additional plugins whenever I set up a new workspace.
- The concept of multiple workspaces with their own plugins and settings is VERY attractive. NetBeans seems to lack this concept.
- I have always preferred to keep the concepts of repository management and project sources separate, rather than making a hard link in my IDE between the two. NetBeans appears to require me to go through a lot of anguish each time I want to switch a project from trunk to branch or back.
- Also, there has developed in the Subversion world a standard of using top-level "trunk", "branches", "tags" dirs, and at least one SVN plugin for Eclipse uses that convention to make switching branches, merging, and updating more intuitive. NetBeans should do the same, allowing the typical branch/tag operations against this de-facto standard layout.
- I tried to delete a CVS-based project to re-checkout via SVN, and it didn't appear to delete all the files successfully. I had to do it manually AND go back through the Subversion wizard again.
- I hate wizards. Don't make me go through a wizard for every one or two settings when I could easily enter them all at once. Wizards like this are totally unhelpful.
- Some time back, Eclipse made the wise decision to also show all non-source files in the source or "package" view. It was widely considered a very good idea, and I miss it. I'd like to have a single view that has source or "Project" smarts without masking files and dirs I really want to see.
- Eclipse recently added a full-text search to their settings dialog that works very well for finding the location of hard-to-reach settings. I would have found two NetBeans settings much more quickly with such a search by entering "antialias" and "browser".
- Browser selection should prefer the settings of the host platform (I'm on Ubuntu Linux).
- NetBeans is a goofy name for an IDE. When I think NetBeans I think "beans for doing network stuff". Forte and Eclipse are better names, though completely undescriptive. Something along the lines of "UberIDE" would be even better. Names like Visual Studio, JBuilder, IDEA, and so on have far less ambiguity about what they mean. NetBeans seems misleading, and I doubt anyone would guess it's an IDE if asked.
- Eclipse keybindings should include C-A-t (open a specific class) and C-A-r (open a specific file/resource anywhere in the project)
- Eclipse provides options for sorting the Outline or "Members View" of a class by name or by visibility, which is nice.
- Eclipse provides options to show packages in a hierarchy rather than as expanded names, which is very nice when expanded package names take up a lot of space (as in JRuby). There are also features to allow using a hierarchy but still collapsing empty packages, so I could have org.jruby as a top-level node (because the org package is empty) and then source files and subpackages under it.
- Editors are anti-aliased, but nothing else is. Why?
- Eclipse supports collapsing multiline /* */ comments, which is very nice for us since every JRuby file includes a reasonably long licensing block at the top.
- Eclipse uses color, bolding, and italics better to differentiate different kinds of variables, methods, keywords, and type names.I would rather see type names, static variables and methods, constants, and fields offset in text than method calls and names. It appears that NetBeans by default only offsets the following:
- Comments: grey (I think green is better/easier to read, but that's a matter of opinion)
- Method names, both declarations and calls: bold black
- Keywords: blue
- Idle/startup memory use seems a lot higher in NetBeans. Mine's idling at 399MB, where Eclipse hovered under 200MB most of the time with several other projects checked out.
- FIXME-style task tags in comments are really, really nice, and I know a LOT of projects that use them (basically, EVERY project that uses Eclipse)
- I would like to be able to manually clear search results from previous searches to eliminate text highlighting.
- Being able to right click within the file and have SCM actions available in that menu is extremely nice, so I can go to an editor for a file I know I want to commit or compare and do that action right away.
- Many files in my project do not have a Subversion submenu in any view...they have a CVS view, and it wants to try to add or delete them from CVS. This isn't even a CVS project, so I have no idea why the CVS submenu would EVER be appropriate to show up. As it is, a large number of files show the CVS submenu and can't be committed directly; I have to commit at a higher level. This is a major goofy bug, perhaps in the Subversion module.
- NetBeans takes longer than Eclipse to start up.
It's only fair to sugar the salt a bit, since it's so far been a pretty good migration. NetBeans has come a long way in the past year or two, and I'm very impressed.
- I'm absolutely stunned at how responsive the UI is most of the time. I frequently have to double-check that an operation has finished successfully because they happen so fast. Sluggish response was one of my biggest reasons for not using NetBeans in the early days.
- I appreciate the fact that NB uses the ant script for builds. I think this is "The Right Way", though I have my doubts about Ant as the "Right Tool" for building software in general. Seamless maven2 integration might be a good thing to add.
- The Runtime pane is nicer and includes more useful things than stock Eclipse provides.
- The default monospaced editor font is much neater and more compact than most Courier fonts, which is what Eclipse uses by default. I dislike serifed fonts for code, even more than I dislike non-monospaced fonts.
- Automatically updating the UI based on outside changes to the project's files and dirs is a no-brainer; I hate having to refresh in Eclipse.
- Undoing all changes to an unsaved modified file causes it to be marked as unmodified again; this is a Very Good Thing.
