Linux software development IDE quandary

[ijstokes-/2FeUQLD3jedFdvTe/nMLpVzexx5G7lz at public.gmane.org (Ian Stokes-Rees)]

On 6/5/10 10:56 AM, Mark Woodward wrote:
> I'm getting a little tired with the vi/make/gdb paradigm. It is getting 
> laborious. With bigger monitors and more screen real estate, IDE's are 
> starting to make more sense. The problem, none of the IDEs I have looked 
> at support external projects very well. Unless you use their project and 
> make system, the IDE is reduced to an MDI editor and a way to run make. 
> You don't get any of the benefit of the tags and stuff.
>   

Mark,  I feel your pain.  Make is crap, but at least it is widely
understood crap.  I have gone through many attempts at alternative build
systems (scons, tmake, jam, maven, ant), and they just suck in different
ways, plus a lot fewer people know how to use them, plus it means
installing them on every system I then want to build on.  But that is
different from your development environment.

On that front,  I have begrudgingly accepted that Eclipse is the best
option.  It is platform neutral, more or less supports every
language/syntax I want to use (Java, C, Fortran, Perl, Python, bash,
XML, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, SQL), understands SVN and CVS
"automatically" (when the right plugin is installed), and the plugin
architecture means there are lots of modules that add nice things like
UML, GUI building, web preview, etc. etc.  EMF (the basis for the
Eclipse IDE) is also increasingly popular for building custom GUI
applications (though I have little experience with this).  I can
continue to work from the command line as necessary, and I can access
projects/files on remote systems via sshfs (other options like webdav
also exist, I believe).

What is the down side?  There are lots.  Eclipse is cumbersome and
utterly fails on the intuitive interface front.  I won't bore you with
my list of bugbears, but I have found the learning curve on Eclipse is
steep, and it is a big time investment to get the IDE setup the way you
want/expect with the plugins you need.  If something in your plugin
chain breaks, you can find the entire IDE is disabled, and it isn't
always clear what plugin has caused it.  With often hundreds of plugins,
process-of-elimination removal is often impractical: reinstall from
scratch may be necessary.

In the past I have been very happy with JBoss and NetBeans (both Java
focused), and Komodo for Python, but the reality of my work is lots of
languages all at once, and a single IDE environment is necessary. 
Eclipse is the best I've found.

All that said, most of the time I use vim, Make, custom build scripts,
and CLI over ssh+screen sessions to my development machines and servers...

Ian