Eclipse Juno

I recently downloaded the current version of the Eclipse IDE. It's called Juno, or 4.2 if you don't have the time to keep up with names (like myself).

I was very excited to use the new version. In the past every time I updated it seemed a host of bugs were fixed and life was good. The Groovy and Grails support generally improves dramatically between releases. 4.2 did not let me down in that area. The editors and over all support for Groovy and Grails are getting pretty good! :)

However, the inspiration for this post is not the good, because the good alone doesn't warrant a post. If the new features were amazing or something, sure a post is in order. That is not the case. Eclipse has updated the UI.... I'm all for pretty new UIs, but only if they work and don't take away from usability.

Previous versions of Eclipse handled screen splitting and tab dragging perfectly. I would change nothing. I have 3 displays, and I am constantly dragging tabs between them. I also drag tabs off to split up the editor on one display so I can see multiple files at once in the same editor.

Well, all that is now busted. I can't drag between editors anymore. Dragging at all seems to make Eclipse stutter and sometimes lock up for a few seconds, but it feels like eons. Now when you drag a tab off an editor, instead of being placed into another existing editor, one that's directly below your mouse, a new editing...window is created. If you hit ctrl+shift+r in that window, the file open dialog opens up, but when you select a file to open, it's opened in the original editor, not in the new window you created.....ARGHHHGHHH.

Lastly, Eclipse is a lot more sluggish now.. I mean it is a Java desktop application. So I allow for a certain amount of hesitation. With 4.2 though, I feel I am often waiting for the screen to repaint :(

So yeah, Eclipse for multiple monitors is pretty well busted. I hope it's fixed soon. Eclipse is the reason I have 3 displays...