Re:Why should I use Eclipse instead of Emacs + JDE (Score 1)

I used to think the same way about IDE's, but Eclipse is really cool. It has great integration with Ant, JUnit and CVS.

Here are some things you can't (easily) do with Emacs:

(1) Automatically generate getters and setters for private variables. This saves a ton of typing.
(2) Move a static method from class Foo to class Bar and have all references to that method updated throughout your project. Likewise, you can rename any method, class or variable and Eclipse will change all the references to it. I find I am much more likely to refactor if I can easily change names without having to go through and fix 92 compile errors in 12 different classes.
(3) Roll back to a previously saved file. You can configure Eclipse so that every time you hit save, it keeps a copy of that saved file. If you need to rollback, you can visually diff your most recent file against the previously saved versions, as sorted by timestamp and rollback to any one of them, even if you haven't checked it into CVS. The visual diffing tool is the best I've ever seen.

There's lots more, but you get the idea. Vi or Emacs is good. Eclipse is a bit better and worth the download.

Anthony Fodor