The first commercial Java project I worked on we used Visual J++. It was a great environment at the time, there was very little else available if I remember correctly. Sun had something which was horrible.
Eclipse is so bad I think those of us who have been in the Java camp for years/decades/whole career have lost sight of just how much better the MS tools were/are.
I don't even remember feeling as much frustration towards VC++ in the 1990s as I do with Eclipse today.
It's too easy to forget Mac wasn't even an option back then. OSX didn't start to become viable till 2003-2004.
I've officially been doing Java 20 years now... part of me really wants to jump the fence and go work on Windows stuff. I jumped the fence to work on Python 6 years ago. But it was "Python being used for stuff Java is 10x better for" and got tired of it after a year. Python is 10x better than Java for lots of things.. but not for giant enterprise systems IMO.
Like I said, when Eclipse arrived a few years later, it provided a lot of utility that J++ did not, and obviously that utility has value. But I think both of us look back fondly on J++ because we know that had it not been cut short, it could have evolved into something different and possibly even better than what we know as Java today. It seems plausible that in an alternate history where J++ kept evolving, I'd be more satisfied with the state of the art.
I recall using Visual J++ and its compiler to do "pure Java" development back then and it was a delight. I only moved to Eclipse later because Eclipse had a deeper understanding of the Java language and was able to do fancy things like traverse a call stack from static code analysis. Eclipse was considerably slower in UI and responsiveness, especially on hardware of the time, but that utility made up for it.