I'm quitting Eclipse, like people quit crack

I'm finally swearing off Eclipse with my Rails development. When I first started using Eclipse with Java projects, it was admittingly pleasant, once you get use to how to set it all up. Colors everywhere, as well as trees to keep organized, and automatically run ANT.

Then I started using it for Rails, because of its relatively low learning curve with RadRails. And with a Subversion plugin called Subclipse, I was hooked.

Well, the honeymoon has ended, I've finally swore them off. I'm on a computer that only has 512MBs of RAM, which really should be more than enough. One could argue, "Just get more RAM!" However, Eclipse eats up more than 140MB of memory. Add that to Firefox 2's voracious appetite for memory (about 120MB until I changed the settings to get it down to about 80 to 100MB), and my computer often slowed to a crawl. having to wait more than a second for anything interrupts my train of thought. I get bored waiting, and often sidetracked--I get knocked out of my zone.

It's been a long time coming, but I've finally switched to command line SVN. It's just that any tutorials I've found were too long winded. This recent one at the top of google's rankings, isn't bad at all. In addition, the bug in Rinari, an emacs mode for Rails, got fixed. So the two reasons to stay with Eclipse is no longer around.

Even though it takes forever to figure out how to change any setting in emacs (like freaking font size!), I figured it's better for me, as I've gotten a bit comfortable in Rails. I need to keep expanding and learning--so if I have to do anything in emacs in the future, I'll have to learn elisp.

The contrast is amazing. Emacs only takes up 4.3 Megs. Switching between different Desktops doesn't take forever now, watching the screen re-draw in slow motion.

I hear rumors that Firefox 3 has better memory management. Thank goodness. It's no longer the lite browser that just popped up. I liked it better when it was more responsive. Granted, they've crammed more stuff into it since they've started, but it shouldn't keep eating up memory to the point of crashing! I'd be looking forward to that. In the meantime, I'll enjoy all my memory breathing room.