It’s Funny When an IDE Slows You Down
I've been working on some interesting additions to one of the projects I'm working on and for the first time I've had to work on this Java app that runs on Windows. There's no Ant build scripts for it, though I suppose I could install Ant on my box, create a build.xml and try to make a go of it, but the command line is pretty nasty and the original author of the component used Eclipse to do the development and testing. So I decided that the easiest thing was to use Eclipse and then I'd be sure that I was doing the same steps he was.
Seemed reasonable.
Because I'm no Eclipse wizard, I had him help me set up my workspace/environment so that it'd build and such, and then I could work on the changes. What I found was not terribly surprising to me, but experiencing it was still shocking. Eclipse is an advanced development environment and it saves a lot of people a lot of time, but I found that it was constantly slowing me down.
I'm far far faster developing in Vim and using Ant - on linux. But this is one little component and so I'll stick with this way of doing things as it makes sense to mirror how the other developer is writing the code, but Holy Cow! I had no idea that it was still this intrusive.
Well... I don't have to use it every day - just those days I'm adding to this little component.