I’m currently using GVIM for C development but recently I’ve discovered that a lot of developers started using Eclipse or Netbeans. There are also a lot more sophisticated themes available for Eclipse (http://www.eclipsecolorthemes.org/) than I’ve seen on http://www.vim.org in ages.
What’s the main incentive for using Eclipse/Netbeans despite their lack for efficient key bindings? Which of the two is better suited for C development? In which aspects are they superior to GVIM, in which ones inferior?
Gvim is an editor, and that’s all. And yes, you could customize gvim to do a lot of things, but it is still an editor. Gvim is the best editor in the world and that’s all about gvim.
Eclipse and Netbeans are IDE. Integrated development environment. So thay are much more than an editor, although they are not so good as an editor as gvim. But you could do other things using an ide besides just text editing. For example, debugging, packaging, deploying, visual designing..etc. You couldn’t easily do all of these using gvim. That’s why we need an ide.
I sugguest eclipse, although for the last year I have been using Netbeans most of the time. The reason is: Netbeans now belongs to Oracle, and Oracle doesn’t care about open source. What Oracle care about is just making more money. For example, I used netbeans to write python programs, but now in version 7 of netbeans, python development support has been removed from netbeans. (and also ruby). Oracle guys said, they had to focus on JDK 7 support, so they have to abandon the support for python and ruby and other not important things. I feel so disappointed. And afterward I turned to gvim.(maybe later I will turn to eclipse, who knows)