Eclipse, bad UI change

I am sure that I am not the first to notice but Eclipse has gone through some changes that are causing a significant slow down in my productivity.

This has been the premiere IDE for many years, offering best of breed user interface design concepts to optimize the life of the Java developer.

I now find it increasingly hard to use for one simple fact. The changes have made it really hard to run unit tests.

One of the magical features was that ctrl-F11 would run the last test I ran so I could continue coding, in any source file, and press this vital key combination to see if I had broken anything yet.

Now, this keystroke, and the action that it is associated with, have been changed in two ways.

Firstly, if you have to be in the test file to reliably run the last test. It is inconsistent in this regard. Most of the time it just asks "How would you like to run ''? On the server or blah blah blah".

Secondly, if it does remember the test I want to run, it now also remembers that last time I ran it in the debugger. So each subsequent run promptly stops on a breakpoint.

This is a flow problem and it is possible that non-test driven developers use the debugger a great deal. I understand, even sympathize, but couldn't Eclipse support both flows? Especially the original, and in my opinion, the far superior. Just run my tests, that's all I ask.

Now if I could just get NetBeans to stop deleting my "build" directory when it creates a project I could say goodbye to this annoying change.

GIT, yes, another source control solution

and you thought Subversion was the latest thing. Ha. How old and slow you are.

You see how cool I can sound when I have just learned something new?

I have GIT installed and working under OSX Leopard and it seems pretty cool so far, given that I haven't done anything worth while with it yet.

First, don't do what I did, which was to goto github, download gitx and expect it to work. Ha, that route is for losers.

Instead, goto the git site itself and get the zip.gz file and go from there. Wait, no, don't do that either, only losers waste time compile from source.

See, how many pit falls I am saving you. This is a great blog.

So, ignore the links you have seen so far and aim for the Download link. This will not down the file, do not worry about that.

Amongst the download formats there is an OS X entry to the Google code site. Be patient, you are on the right track.

There, at the top of the list, is the git-1.6.0.2-intel-leoard.dmg file. Yes, this is the real download that will work. The download for non-losers like you.

This will give you command line GIT which is probably all you need, if you are a loser. I was a loser for a short time when I finally realized what I was doing. Man oh man these things take time to work out.

I love NetBeans. I also love Eclipse but its Ruby support blows by comparison so I love NetBeans more. And NetBeans has a GIT plugin. This is for non-losers. It's called nbgit.

Now remember, losers will try to install nbgit in their NetBeans IDE, and we all know that would be a dumb move. Unless you really love searching through reams of dependency errors, and what the hell is the NetBeans Presentation crappy thing that I don't have anyway.

Go get NetBeans 6.1 and install that first. Then, as a non-loser, you will be selecting Tools-Plugins-Downloads and selecting the nbgit nbm file that you download earlier.

git clone git:/reality
update to life version niner dot niner
git diff
See all the good changes that you have made
git commit

And here, courtesy of the kind blogger Tim Dysinger, are some cool git settings that you might want to use.

Get started with this tutorial, short and to the point.