Eclipse
I usually don’t think of myself as an IDE person, but since I downloaded it yesterday I’ve been extremely impressed with Eclipse. It looks just like part of my Gnome 2 desktop, it works very well with CVS out of the box, and there’s a lot of people working on it (outside of the core developers at IBM), writing plugins to support various languages and version control systems. (Most of these projects seem to be hosted on SourceForge - do a search for “Eclipse Plugin” and see what you get).
Screen shot of Eclipse, working on Hep
I found two different Python plugins in development, neither of which does more than provide syntax highlighting at the moment. That’s OK with me, though, since Eclipse lets you set up external programs (like /usr/bin/python) which you can run against the current file and see the output from (with error messages highlighted in red). I also installed a C# plugin, which worked fine for writing a “Hello World” program using Mono, and a couple other plugins for XSL and Ruby.
But the really exciting thing is this: You can use the JFaceDbc plugin, combined with the Microsoft JDBC driver for SQL Server, to run SQL statements against SQL Server from Linux, with a nice modern looking GUI (screenshot). This is something I’ve been looking for for a long time, since we use SQL Server where I work.
As IDE’s go, Eclipse isn’t too intrusive, either. It’s still a bit too slow loading and to use for simple file-editing jobs, and the single-window-with-lots-of-stuff-in-it UI definitely doesn’t feel “unixy”. But when you’re spending large amounts of time working on a set of source files it works really well. And it doesn’t require you to make modifications to your existing projects. It creates a single hidden XML file called .project in the top level directory, but other than that your code is left as-is.
