I know that there are some programmers and web developers here at BAUT. I'm curious to know if any of you use Eclipse. I've played with it off and on but decided to spend today really digging into it so that I can use it as a primary editor for html, coldfusion, xml, etc.

Why doesn't control-tab switch between open documents, the way it does in every other program?

Also, why is it that if I double-click a file in the navigation view, it pops up a whole new eclipse instance? I have to drag the file from the navigation view into the editor to get it to open a new editor tab. That's really strange. That might be a deal breaker for me.

Any time I've heard someone mention Eclipse at a conference or something, they had nothing but praise for it. So, I must be misunderstanding something.

I use Eclipse for my Java programming. I thought it worked exactly as you complain it's not working (certainly the latter). You might see if there are preferences you can set - I'll check next time I'm at the office and see how I'm configured.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

yeah, I could have sworn it worked the "correct" way the last time I played with it, on a mac. Maybe something is wrong with my file associations. I should be able to right-click and select open with eclipse.exe and that should be it, right?

edit: yep. I just installed it on my laptop and it works the same way. I associated .xml files with eclipse, but when I click on one (even in the navigator) it opens it in a whole new instance.

Okay, I'm playing with my version of Eclipse now.

Double-clicking on a filename in the "Package Explorer" view brings it up as a new tab just fine. I don't see any way of modifying this behavior in the preferences area.

Tabbing amongst files appears to be done by entering CTRL-F6 to move forward or CTRL-SHIFT-F6 to move backwards. This seems unnecessarily arcane.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Perhaps you mean that trying to open a file from Windows Explorer opens it up in a new instance. If that's the problem you're having, that is indeed the way that it works, and from conversations with the developers, there is no expectation that they will ever change it to open up in the same instance, unless someone takes it upon themselves to write a plug-in that can accomplish it. It's the thing that annoys me most about Eclipse.

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Conserve energy. Commute with the Hamiltonian.

Yep, that's what I mean Grey. It annoys me too. The funny thing is, I wouldn't be half as annoyed about it if eclipse wasn't so great in every other way! In that case, I could just decide not to use it. As it stands, I feel I have to use it or I'm missing out on all this great functionality.

There's been a discussion among the eclipse developers about this for years:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=4922

I knew I wasn't crazy!

Actually, I'm very pleased to see that link, because it looks like there are developers that actually think it might be a problem worth solving. From what I had seen before now, it seemed like they didn't even consider it something important enough to work on. So maybe they'll get it done. If I had the time, I'd try to do it myself, but I've never really looked at the source code for Eclipse, so I imagine it might take me a while to work it out.

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Conserve energy. Commute with the Hamiltonian.