Over about 20 years of Java I've personally had to deal with JBuilder, Visual J++, Eclipse, IntelliJ and NetBeans and probably some I've forgotten. I don't understand where all the Eclipse hate comes from - it's fast, responsive, extensible and works well. Looks elegant to me too, where is that vitriol coming from in the article?

I've certainly seen configurations of Eclipse that are abysmal (Rational Application Developer) and/or frameworks that make things unbearable (moreso in the past). But it's always felt more usable and productive than anything else I've tried. I don't understand the passion I see from IntelliJ users either... it's about as ugly and unintuitive to me as NetBeans was. Perhaps it's just what you're used to.

One positive people tend to raise in support of IntelliJ IDEA is it's refactoring support... I've honestly found Eclipse's to be better. Normally I wouldn't defend anything so heavily backed by IBM, but objectively it's far better than anything else as far as I've found.

It may be because the fact that Eclipse has cluttered user interface which looks like something developed in the 90s, despite we have 2016 now. Maybe because it has myriads of plugins that are not well maintained, documented, or just does not work. Maybe because auto-completion is slow and does not display most probable candidates. It might also be that dark theme is pain in the eyes. I don't know, really...

Seriously though, I believe Eclipse should hire good UI designer to produce modern, fast and good looking interface. Measure what people use, how they use it, for what reason - and then improve it. I got a feeling that they forgot (and it happened very early in the project life time) about the most important part of every project - end user.