Eclim is Eclipse for Vim Lovers
Eclipse is a powerful open source IDE. It is designed in a very extensible fashion that makes it attractive for software engineers to experiment with it. A few months ago, I started writing a number of Eclipse plugins. When I used Eclipse as my IDE, I liked a number of cool features such as automatic management of the package imports, some code refactoring snippets, automatic compilation, smart auto completion… etc.
Vim is one of the most powerful editors if not THE most powerful. It is very light weight. There is a huge community support for it. You can pretty much find plugins for most desired features. And if it isn’t implemented, it is easy to write it yourself.
Personally, I think it is unfair to compare Eclipse to Vim because this would be comparing oranges to apples; IDE to an editor. However we can definitely argue that Vim can be compared to Eclipse editing features. In this case, (for vim lovers like me) Vim wins for multiple reasons that I won’t list here because I don’t want to go into this war. So, how can we use Vim but also use the powerful IDE features?
Well, among other solutions, Eclim is just what I was wishing for. Eclim provides the best of both worlds. It enables vim to use features of a headless Eclipse. So, you still use vim to edit your files but you also get all the previously mentioned cool stuff. It is definitely worth a shot. I am going to use it in my next real Java project and I’ll inform you of my opinion after realistic use.
Let me know, what do you think.
I was wondering how did you find the eclim experience after this post, you said you would follow up. Are you still using it for java coding, I am sick of large slow ides and am seriously considering a switch. Thanks.
Peter,
Overall, it was a good experience, but eclim could use some enhancements. I worked on a relatively large Java project and I didn’t face any big problems with it. The two main things that I used are automatic compilation and smart auto completion. the automatic compilation is a little slow. Almost as slow as it is in Eclipse. Probably, because it still uses Eclipse engine behind the scenes. Auto completion works fine until the list gets big then it starts to act a little slow too.
I think that you should give it a try yourself. It really did save me a lot of time and it was cool. Looking forward to hear your feedback.