Just in case no one has ever given any feedback WRT Eclipse, Id like to be the first. My experience is using it with all the features for a NRF51822 project, and it kind of works but is simply not worth using (unless your forced to as in my current situation).
Id like to mention just how absolutely terrible Eclipse is (in general). Completely unintuitive, painful to do even the most simplest of tasks, quirky and generally stress inducing:
- The general IDE look and feel, sometimes you need to wait-click-wait because of the obvious inefficiencies underneath. The layout also takes up so much screen space just to have textured boxes... TRACE32 is a good example of how to neatly show the maximum information, Eclipse is awful!
- Consoles - Ahhhhh right so you click and select....good to know as I was busy reading when it just went off somewhere! Why not just have more tabs!!! Its obvious then.
- Copying similar test projects end in hacking it together as copy makes a copy where parts can only be edited in XML project file. So you end up exporting settings and modifying them then re importing and editing the rest... wasting time!
- Linking to existing common related source files without copying the actual files. What a ball ache that is. You can do it via import - general - filesystem and edit the advanced settings but Im still not sure that it actually did it correctly as I had issues and removed them all.
- Emsys....Register values???... Oh double click!!!!! Well bloody well say that or provide a check box column labelled 'monitor'. RO column is also wrong as they are writable registers!
- Perspectives are so clunky, switching is just not quick enough. I realise that this is becuase hardware is being polled but its so much slower than many of the alternative IDE that also use Segger, Lauterbach and even a wiggler!!! God help anyone using a wiggler with Eclipse...that would be like trying to paint the Mona Lisa without hands.
- Parts of the IDE dont redraw correctly in some circumstances so you left with white patches. Its OK though becuase if you move the windows about they go... great use of time.
- Did I mention its slow! On a 3.2GHz processor with 16GB RAM!
Obviously the annoyance isnt really directly at Nordic, more their use of it (and a growing number of IC providers that ship it as a viable development platform).
Maybe its me.. but Ive used TI CCS <4 for DSP development for years but TI heavily modified it so it worked well. The (TI CCS) modern version is modified enough not to cause annoyance. Keil, IAR, Microchip (Old)... even Netbeans.... never had a problem. Even Lauterbach which required learning their scripting language was no issue compared to frustration of Eclipse. I mostly use Notepad++ and makefiles but need a debugger occasionally and the client doesnt want to pay for any professional tools....
feel better now...
