As a generalist I usually have to open multiple applications just to get work done; Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks/Image Ready, VS2005 and all major browsers are but a few apps in my developer toolbox I use frequently. Having multiple desktop applications open at the same time makes ctrl-tabbing frustrating—killing productivity. Development tools are usually very memory intensive too, so the more you have open the slower your system gets.
I love the Eclipse platform and the way you could extend core functionality via plugins. For several months now I have been using the Apatana plugin for Eclipse which adds better support for CSS, (X)HTML, JavaScript and a few of the latest platforms such as Adobe AIR and iPhone.
Eclipse is platform independent as it's built on the Java Runtime environment. So theoretically if you have a team of developers with different OS taste you could even share project settings.
I'm currently running Eclipse IDE 3.3 with the following plugins:
- The Aptana plugin
- Aptana Radrails
- Subclipse
- Adobe Flex Builder
- PDT (PHP Development Tools)
- WST (Web Standard Tools)
I don't ctrl+tab as much now but Eclipse does get pretty sluggish at times, which could be a downer if you have a slow system.
Nice post,
Eclipse seems like a nice platform. thanks for mentioning that and I agree with you ,the number of plugin it has is amazing
Thanks for writing, most people don’t bother.