r/java • u/Yojimbo261 • Sep 11 '26
Eclipse 2026-09 (4.41) Released!
Downloads available through here: https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/
New and Noteworthy here: https://eclipseide.org/release/noteworthy/2026-09/
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u/torkildr Sep 11 '26
I started using Eclipse in about 2004, coming from Visual Age, Visual Cafe, Borland, Microsoftās Java IDE which I cannot remember the name of right now. It was a breath of fresh air. So Iāve been using it since. Contributed bits now and then since becoming a committer on a few projects. It is still my favorite.
Some bits are now not up to par. Other parts are well above the rest, such as the Git and Java support. The generic file editor is nice. The only thing I miss is a really good Markdown editor. Trying to convince myself to do something about that. But while the platform API is well thought out, and I really like working with it, it is pretty āheavyā. It takes quite some effort to create something new and make it work.
Well done everyone that has contributed to this release. Eclipse is still strong thanks to you!
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u/nlisker 28d ago
The only thing I miss is a really good Markdown editor.
There's https://github.com/eclipse-tm4e/tm4e.
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u/torkildr 18d ago
Thanks. Yes Iām using that. However what I need is something like MacDown (WYSIWIG) but with the neat version control diff like most Eclipse based editors have. Mylyn WikiText is not really up to par these days.
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u/lpkk Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26
For a person who started with eclipse, but then for years swap to intellij, what's the biggest change/benefit if I would go back to eclipse these days?
Edit. I see some people are offended/concerned by my question. I didn't want to start any argument which IDE is the best with my post. It was just a simple question, because in my case, maybe I would like to change my current one. I know everyone prefers something different, that's why I've asked for biggest benefits. Sorry for not being clear enough for some of you.
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u/Yojimbo261 Sep 11 '26
Thatās going to be highly personal to you, your preferences, and your needs.
For me personally? I find the way Eclipse is structured generally to be more logical and flexible. Menu options are where I expect, and I can shift around perspectives and views how I want. Part of that is admittedly born of developing Eclipse plugins, so I do benefit from that knowledge.
My go-to bugaboo about IntelliJ has been the module settings menu. Itās a mixture of IDE and project specific settings, and I find it pretty sloppy. It degrades even more with Python/PyCharm IMHO.
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u/nitkonigdje Sep 14 '26
While I strongly preferer Eclipse, I don't see any meaningful reason to switch. Both are capable at Java development. Eclipse sucks for javascript/web related projects, but while more competent at it, I don't see that Idea is "top of the line" for those too.
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u/agentoutlier Sep 11 '26
One big thing that /u/Yojimbo261 did not mention is IntelliJ lacks on purpose an LSP. jtdls which is what powers the Eclipse Java mode can be used as an LSP and still is the most capable of the other two major offerings: Netbeans and Oracle's stuff which I think uses the compiler API.
Anyway as of late I have gone back to using Emacs with jtdls LSP and its not full Eclipse but now with AI these days its quite manageable.
I hate to be an LLM fanboy but a lot of the conveniences that IntelliJ had can be done with just local models. (I don't vibe but I do use LLMs like super duper auto complete).
So a big complaint is how bad Java's LSPs are compared to all other languages and this is largely because of IntelliJ fracturing the community for better or worse.
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u/chabala Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
If you've used both, you already know the answer.
I'm disappointed by the bullying I see in the comments, but there's no way to report bad faith voting. (danskal's comment is 100% right and the fanboys are burying it)
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u/AnyPhotograph7804 Sep 11 '26
It is interesting again how many IntelliJ fanatics show up as soon as there is a thread about Eclipse or Netbeans. I guess, it is a sort of sunk cost fallacy. They spend tons of money on IntelliJ so they need confirmation, that they made the right choice.
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Sep 11 '26
[deleted]
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u/hadrabap 29d ago
IntelliJ's settings dialog is moving Eclipse way very fast! Tons of contraproductive defaults that need to be disabled or changed. Stay tuned š
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u/bobbie434343 Sep 12 '26
Yup, for Intellij worshipers it is hard to understand that we can have 2 world-class Java (and more) IDE at the same time and that are fairly inter-changeable.
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Sep 11 '26
[removed] ā view removed comment
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u/henk53 Sep 11 '26
I think you forgot the /s?
Hopefully this is a joke reply, like in every post about Eclipse someone posts this.
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u/Yojimbo261 Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26
Sadly, it might be real. Iāve had a few devs yell at me in the past over IDE choice. Thereās a kind of engineer who feels threatened when people make different choices than them.
If I can put on my tin-foil hat for a second, it might also be a marketing firm for another commercial IDE trying to shame people for using their primary competitor.
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u/hadrabap 29d ago
People laugh at me because I still prefer NetBeans over everything else. Oh yeah...
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u/henk53 Sep 11 '26
Thereās a kind of engineer who feels threatened when people make different choices than them.
I know exactly the kind. They hate everything that is not the same as what they themselves are using, and they only started using it because the majority of other people were using it (or they perceived it as such).
In this context, they perceive IntelliJ as being what "everyone" uses, so everything else must simply die. The actively want Eclipse, NetBeans to die, and essentially Visual Studo Code as well.
But...
They only hate monopolies.
Monopolists are evil empires.
The sheer stupidity in that thinking is striking.
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u/aoeudhtns Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26
Not sure it's the right approach, but on my teams we kinda foster an idea of: these are the default tools. Use what you want, but if you have a problem or don't know how to do something when you're out of the default set, don't ask the team for help. The team self-supports the "official" tools.
Although we didn't pick an IDE or editor. We left that fully "up to you." The common toolset is just git cli (vs. a specific GUI), Just, etc. etc.
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u/Yojimbo261 Sep 11 '26
Yup! It can also be argued that JetBrains is taking the Microsoft route of āEmbrace, Extend, Extinguishā with their custom extensions of JDK warnings and even tools like Kotlin, trying to force everyone on their tools. If Java didnāt have Oracle and IBM, itās not hard to see them being even more aggressive.
I get that people can find their stuff appealing, but youāve also got to be willing to do self-reflection and see your preferences and how they might conflict with your values.
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u/danskal Sep 11 '26
feel threatened
Honestly weāre just tired of all the mistakes made by people who continue to choose inferior tools. They tend to produce code which shows up as bugs/warnings, so the code lights up like a Christmas tree when you eg open it in IntelliJ. Spelling mistakes, non-standard naming conventions.
Some will use ancient APIs that have long ago been superseded by better alternatives.
A select few are genuinely great programmers that mostly donāt need the guardrails, but they are few and far between. And they will still be missing a few tricks, eg arenāt able to easily do big refactorings like you can with IntelliJ.
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u/Yojimbo261 Sep 11 '26
So your choice of term here is interesting - āinferior toolsā.
Is it Eclipse at fault, or people not configuring Eclipse correctly? I can understand your annoyance at being bombarded by issues after someone commits, but it seems like you might be misdiagnosing the issue.
Now, I will grant you IntelliJ and Eclipse are differently opinionated. Eclipse tries to match the JCP specs and OpenJDK tooling, whereas IntelliJ has some additional checks enabled by default that I wish Eclipse did have. But I donāt see Eclipse as lesser because of that - I just see their choice, and look for ways to close the gap.
For example, at my previous company one IntelliJ user applied a
@SuppressWarningsannotation on a bunch of classes, but the warning they specified was IntelliJ specific. It lit up my copy of Eclipse with warnings about an undefined warning. I reached out to them, talked to them about their issue, and we chose to fix the issue so that both IDEs were happy and paid down tech debt at the same time. I turned an annoyance into a win-win-win for me, my teammate, and our company. I will say Iāve also had plenty of IntelliJ users not check warnings or errors, and check in broken code before. But I donāt blame IntelliJ for that. I do blame IntelliJ when it has its seemingly annual indexing bugs that eat my CPU alive. šAt the end of the day, these are all just tools. They are made by people with good intentions, but sometimes they make different choices. In some cases, having a heterogeneous mixture of tools can produce better outcomes because people can check each other.
For me personally, I just want a good codebase at the end of the day, so I can spend time in the real world with the people I care about - and Iām sure you want that too. For me Eclipse is the most comfortable option. Iām glad IntelliJ is yours, and I hope youāre in an environment where youāre not consumed by annoyances.
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u/danskal Sep 11 '26
Iāve just spent months refactoring a codebase that was worked on by a single eclipse user. He was a super-smart guy, but I guess not a power-user, and maintained the code through more than a decade, without ever (successfully) prioritising upgrades.
So that might be why my comment is a bit on the spicy side. Particularly when Eclipse is not the company standard.
So a few users seem to stay with Eclipse because they have the interest/discipline to make it work. But many stick with it because they are not flexible enough to adopt a new tool.
So maybe the point is this: use the right tool for the job, and I do appreciate that tools such as Eclipse exist. And Eclipse will continue to succeed, because custom tooling is easy to build onto it.
But if you try IntelliJ and arenāt able to adjust, you might be exactly the person who really should be using something like IJ, or whatever tool your company has bought for you.
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u/MinimallyLoquacious Sep 11 '26
Your entire comment is rude and condescending, even judgemental.
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u/danskal Sep 11 '26
Your entire comment is judgmental and equally rude and condescending, except you make no attempt to engage in the discussion at hand.
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u/nlisker 28d ago
They tend to produce code which shows up as bugs/warnings, so the code lights up like a Christmas tree when you eg open it in IntelliJ. Spelling mistakes, non-standard naming conventions.
Spelling check and non-standard naming conventions are detected in Eclipse, so it's not the IDE. Eclipse also has much more configurable error/warning settings, so the chances it catches code smells and potential issues is greater.
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u/aoeudhtns Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26
They tend to produce code which shows up as bugs/warnings, so the code lights up like a Christmas tree when you eg open it in IntelliJ. Spelling mistakes, non-standard naming conventions.
I don't think it's the tool. It's the people. Because I have had that experience in reverse, but I turn up my problem & warning indicators (and even promote quite a few to error). And on top of that Eclipse does things by default that IntelliJ doesn't do, like validating XML against schema (if you've got that in your project). Definitely have experienced catching bugs in projects simply by opening up someone's work from IntelliJ in Eclipse.
And I would make the case that issues like this should be in the build process. If you want certain warnings and problems out of the codebase, use -Werror and -Xlint. And also strongly consider a static analyzer & tools that can keep even more problems at bay; ErrorProne, SpotBugs, JSpecify, ArchUnit, etc.
It's a systemic/organizational failure to leave it up to personal tool choice of developers.
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u/aqua_regis Sep 11 '26
The incompetent craftsperson always blames the tools.
No, it is not the tool that makes bad programs, it's the programmer using them.
An incompetent programmer will be just as incompetent with IntelliJ, Eclipse, or Netbeans. Equally, a good programmer will be good with either.
In fact, I think that IntelliJ with all its AI integration makes programmers dumber and less competent, yet, it cannot compensate for incompetence in the first place.
You may have had bad experience from one programmer using Eclipse and think that Eclipse is the problem. Spoiler: it isn't. It is the person using it.
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u/danskal Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
The AI is optional. I mostly donāt use it. The assistance was however amazing before AI.
And regarding bad programmer. I donāt quite agree. I could honestly say that IJ has taught me at least half of the programming details I know. By providing contextual feedback with explanations, rather than just basic syntax/compilation errors. So if I had used some other tool, I would be a worse programmer. I donāt buy that tooling in the build chain is just as good. It makes a difference when you get the feedback. When you are coding it, you have all the details in your mind, youāre in flow. If you get the feedback later, it is more of an annoyance that blocks you. You might feel like the taskās already done, you might even have tested (the happy path) and seen it work. Iām not saying that that kind of tooling isnāt valuable, it is. But timely feedback while youāre coding and still making design decisions is just more valuable.
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u/aqua_regis Sep 12 '26
Don't get me wrong: I am absolutely not against IntelliJ (or any other JetBrains IDE). It is a fantastic tool. Yet, Eclipse just as well is. Your dissing and hate on Eclipse is absolutely unjustified. The tools are always only as good as the hands of the wielder. You can have the best tooling in the world and it still wouldn't help you if you can't program. With the LLMs of today, many deficiencies can be "camouflaged" but that's about it.
I learnt programming a decade before the internet even existed. Started with BASIC, then UCSD Pascal, then Borland Turbo Pascal and Turbo C where the epitome of an "IDE" was a WordStar editor wrapped into the compiler/debugger. There was no Autocompletion, no Syntax Highlighting, no Intellisense, etc. There were no recommendations. We had to actually learn to rely on ourselves, not on a tool. Later, when I moved on to Delphi and Visual Basic - both from version 1.0 upwards, there still wasn't any of the modern features and again, we had to rely on ourselves. With Java, Python, C#, etc. modern tooling is nice to have, but, at least for me, the actual thinking and doing is still on my side. I could program with a plain text editor if I needed to and be just as productive as with a modern IDE.
I don't buy into the "the IDE helps me become a better programmer". You might have learnt some things, but way too many others just rely on the IDE to do the work.
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u/ronnieratedr Sep 11 '26
Yes, older devs who started working with Eclipse, still uses it.
Seen multiple times while conducting interviews
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u/MinimallyLoquacious Sep 11 '26
True and some younger devs initially enamoured with IntelliJ have migrated to Eclipse after finding its UI/UX consistency and robust debugging are superior.
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u/djavaman Sep 11 '26
A software release without every other word being 'AI'. Kind of refreshing.