Eclipse tortures its users. I'm convinced that Eclipse users suffer from Editor Stockholm Syndrome. I HATE Eclipse with a passion, and have gone to great lengths to not have that unreliable "tool" be any part of my development system.

It has burned dozens of hours of productivity as it:

1. CHANGES the configuration of the project every time it loads. Seriously. I had to revert the project every time I ran Eclipse because it would break the configuration (which I originally set up IN Eclipse, so I don't know what was wrong here).

2. Fails to notice important files have changed outside of its knowledge (no auto-refresh). God forbid I change a file in git or in another (decent) editor.

3. Fails to refresh when I hit F5 (randomly the F5 key is or isn't assigned to refresh; I haven't figured out the pattern).

4. Gets stuck and won't build if there's an error it doesn't understand -- and you have to "delete the error" to get it to build. WTF?!

5. C++ support? Really? I tried the recommended plug-in, and despite looking everywhere that made sense, I was unable to figure out how to give it an include path. No one has been able to help me here, either. If it's configurable somewhere, then they sure made it hard to find. So all my "C++ integration" resulted in lots of undefined functions and includes, which was worthless. Needless to say, auto-complete was also worthless, since it couldn't find the definition of my shared_ptr class.

6. WAY too heavy. My favorite editor (SlickEdit) is already too heavy. Eclipse makes it seem light and nimble by comparison! Running the editor only takes about a MINUTE on my laptop, and it eats resources like mad.

7. Important project configuration details are hidden in opaque binary files, so you can't just check your project environment into source control.

8. Some kinds of paths end up being stored in the project as absolute paths, meaning that you can't use relative paths that would work in anyone's repository -- and you can't share those projects between Linux/Mac/Windows at all.

That's off the top of my head. I'm sure there are plenty of issues I'm not remembering.

I went into using Eclipse really, REALLY wanting to like it. It was everything I was looking for -- free, cross-platform, lots of plug-ins for different features, a huge supportive community. But I just can't like something that screws me at every turn, even if it can suggest ways to fix my Java code.

Some of these issues may be caused by a poorly written Android plug-in. I honestly don't know. But it's caused me hours of pain, and many other Android developers I've talked with have similar horror stories.

Using Eclipse to build for Android was almost completely non-deterministic, even when doing CLEAN builds; I gave up on using it to do my Android builds entirely, switching to the Android Ant build process. Which has its own issues...

And Eclipse doesn't support the in-file completion I'm talking about either, though without all the other problems I might have tried to hack something into place.

FYI, I just saw an announcement recently of a Lua plug-in for Eclipse that sounds great. Too bad Eclipse has sucked SO badly for me that I don't even want to try it. They're doing interesting things to try to guess autocompletions in Lua, which is a hard problem to get right.

Also FYI, SlickEdit doesn't come from Redmond. And Developer Studio has a WAY better debugging environment than Eclipse's, hands down, possibly in part because the underlying GDB doesn't support as many features.

If Eclipse works for you, great. The Android development team apparently uses it and likes it. Maybe you know how to use it much better than I, or maybe I'm used to better tools. We'll never know. I know some people still use Notepad or equivalent for coding, which strikes me as insane, and Eclipse is certainly better than that. But Eclipse tortured me daily while I was using it, and I can't imagine going back to it.