A couple of profs tell the students at our school to use it. Students would ask me (a tutor) "can you help me with this problem with eclipse?" and then point to the worst UI anyone ever created.
I want to like it, because open source and stuff, but it's just horrible
I'd go out of my way to install the necessary plugins on vscode before I'd use Eclipse. I can't even figure out how to open my damn project that I accidentally closed FFS!!
It's a hot mess. Or it was 10 years when I was last forced to use it.
I remember there was one setting I needed to adjust from time to time. However the menu tree it was in had been removed leaving it a orphaned tree. So you couldn't get to it through the ui. The only way to get to the setting was to go to a unrelated page in the documentation and click on the goto link in it. That would launch the menu that otherwise didn't exist. From there you could back up and get into the menu to adjust the setting.
I entered the world of Java a few years ago, there were already memes about eclipse back then, so I was prepared to prefer Intellij.
I tried both. Intellij is much more polished, it had some annoying bugs too, but the selling point for me was that eclipse was (is) really good at syncing every change directly to wildfly. This is a huge timesaver. The maven to eclipse plugin I think?
I've tried with jrebel but it's not as quick and reliable as with eclipse.
I am fully prepared for a solution where Intellij is better so please let me know, but no one in our organisation (which has about 50 devs) has found it.
Eclipse has its share of problems (and outdated UI and workflows), still I'll happily use it over IntelliJ w/o hesitation.
Funnily enough, a lot of other (Java)Senior developers who tried both are fine with Eclipse, too.
Besides the astroturfing from IDEA which is really annoying, Eclipse integrates far better with standard build tools and is our last descend Open Source IDE (Netbeans effectively being a zombie at this time).
IDEA is already pushing/forcing their own solutions/build tools/etc. to up sell their shit, once Eclipse is gone, there will be no alternative and IDEA/IntelliJ will start the entshittifaction....
People really forgot what a shit show were the 90s, paying lots of money for commercial IDEs.
I don't actually think eclipse is completely terrible (just saw the opportunity for a meme). My main problem with it is that unlike intelliJ, the UI buttons don't scale with the font size, making it pretty unusable on my HiDPI laptop.
For now I'll just stick with IntelliJ/idea IDEs (I have access to an education license for ultimate) and then if/when Idea ruins it I'll probably just try to integrate my Java workflow into either VS Code or an nvim setup