What do you like best about Eclipse?
What I like most about Eclipse is that it feels like a reliable home base for our UI automation work. Projects stay neatly organized, code completion and refactoring are strong, and the debugger is still one of the best for stepping through messy flows and catching edge cases. Plugins make day-to-day work easier—Selenium/TestNG/Java, build tools, reporting—so we can drop in what we need and get back to writing tests instead of wrestling with setup. Run configurations also help a lot: I can target full suites or single cases quickly, tweak environment variables, and re-run without rebuilding everything, which saves a ton of small minutes over the course of a week. Most days it’s open, code, run, fix, repeat, and Eclipse keeps up.
Integration with our ADO Git repo is honestly great. I can pull, commit, push, manage branches, stage hunks, and review diffs right inside the IDE, so I don’t have to jump to another tool just to move a change forward. That reduces context switching and keeps the automation loop smooth—write a test, run it, fix it, commit, push, done. Setup is straightforward too: create a new workspace, import projects, add the key plugins from Marketplace, and I’m productive quickly. Once the environment is in place, adding a new library or driver is predictable, and teammates can mirror the same configuration without weird surprises.
Feature-wise, it’s packed but still practical. Perspectives help me stay focused, the Problems and Console views make it clear where things broke, and searching across the workspace stays fast even on larger codebases. Build tool integration (Maven/Gradle) helps dependencies land the right way, and the IDE understands the classpath so tests resolve cleanly. I also appreciate the smaller touches like TODO markers, quick fixes, and source formatting that keeps reviews tidy. For UI automation specifically, having everything in one place—code, configs, data files, runners—makes handoff and maintenance simpler. I use Eclipse many days a week, and it continues to feel dependable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Eclipse?
Plugin installs can be a bit weird. I’ll add or update a plugin, and then the IDE starts throwing seemingly random errors on code that was fine five minutes earlier. A restart usually clears it up, but it still steals time at exactly the wrong moment. I’ve also noticed the indexer can go pretty heavy on larger projects; the UI gets a little sluggish until it finishes. Every now and then, EGit gets out of sync with the file system and I end up in a “file changed on disk” pop-up dance, or the workspace cache needs a clean build to settle down. None of this is a dealbreaker—just small papercuts I run into when I’m trying to move fast. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.