When comparing Eclipse with JSDT vs Neovim, the Slant community recommends Neovim for most people. In the question“What are the best JavaScript IDEs or editors?” Neovim is ranked 3rd while Eclipse with JSDT is ranked 34th. The most important reason people chose Neovim is:
NeoVim was a complete rewrite of Vim, with new features added and underlying issues resolved thanks to the Vim code base. The keybindings and configuration are the same as Vim, so the switch can be pretty simple.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Provides quick fixes
Eclipse with JSDT provides you with quick fixes every time a warning or error is raised by the IDE. This feature is particularly helpful at places in code where errors were caused by the programmer just being a little "lazy", such as missing out the +
sign between two operands or a variable being out of scope.
Pro Smart Code completion
Just like all other IDEs, Eclipse offers you inline code completion (even with any external JS libraries added to the project).
Pro Free and cross-platform
Eclipse runs on Windows, Linux and Mac, and is totally free of cost.
Pro Code refactoring
Eclipse's refactoring features are quite similar to Webstorm's. It provides almost the same functionalities which include renaming, moving, and member extraction to make your code tidier
Pro Code auto-completion for brackets and parenthesis
This feature is particularly useful when you've added a lot of nesting in your code and you're unable to recall which opening bracket corresponds to which closing one.
Pro Large selection of plugins
Eclipse has a large and active community, which has resulted in a wide variety of plugins.
Pro Highly customizable
Thanks to the large variety of plugins and various configuration options available, Eclipse is very customizable.
Pro Seamless integration with web servers like Apache or Jetty
Eclipse lets you integrate web servers (like Apache or Jetty) into the IDE, which you could use for in-container testing or providing services.
Pro Good integration with git using eGit plugin
Pulling, pushing, staging, stashing, etc., are all available in Eclipse as IDE functionalities.
Pro Still Vim but with upgraded features and some issues fixed
NeoVim was a complete rewrite of Vim, with new features added and underlying issues resolved thanks to the Vim code base. The keybindings and configuration are the same as Vim, so the switch can be pretty simple.
Pro Better integration with external tools
The core text editor is "headless", meaning it's detached from the user-interface so other programs can hook into it. This enables better integration with IDEs and browsers, where "Vim mode" has typically been a poor substitute because it was a partial rewrite or a partial port at best. One of the advantages of Vim has always been ubiquity and Neovim makes it even more ubiquitous.
Pro Powerful plugin model
Vim plugins have always been useful, but tied to specific languages. Neovim's architecture provides better separation between plugins and the core product, so that plugins are completely flexible and can be written in any language.
Pro Built-in terminal emulator
This avoids the user having to make any installations.
Pro UI Agnostic
The core functionality is handled apart from the UI, meaning that Neovim can be embedded into any other GUI system, such as Atom.
Pro Async plugin execution
Pro Active development community
Pro Opens a 3Gig Text File in a few seconds
Not many editors can open such a large text file so quickly.
Pro Fast and light on memory usage
New neovim editor instance starts instantly and you can have multiple editors open at the same time, because id does not require a lot of memory to run.
Pro Easier to pick-up than ever
Don't believe it? Try typing vimtutor in your command line right now.
Pro Work in TUI (Text User Interface)
Neovim can work on terminal, on a remote server over ssh.
Pro Modern code base
As a refactor over Vim, Neovim has greatly improved its code base. For example, some functionality is handled by libuv, the same code base that powers Node.js.
Pro Comes with some good configurations out of the box
Some typical configurations most of VIM users make are default in Neovim.
Pro Even more powerful since 2019, because of additions such as vim-coc, TabNine, fzf, skim
Vim gets stronger every time command-line tools get stronger. This isn't even it's the final form.
Pro Config file is where it should be
I don't like having dotfiles or dotdirs in my homefolder unless they're needed. Configs should be in the .config
dir in their respective folder.
Pro Built-in file-explorer and ability to make splits and edit multiple things simutaneously.
This makes editing multiple files at once, moving code around so easy.
Pro Treesitter and LSP
Pro Terminal mode is very convenient for testing code in a split window
Cons
Con Uses a lot of memory
Eclipse hogs a lot of memory, although this can be controlled by the IDE start-up ini file.
Con Plugins can be unstable
Though there are plenty of plugins to choose from, they aren't always reliable. Some aren't maintained, bug fixes can be slow, and you may need to download plugins from multiple sources.
Con Support and problem solving is difficult to find
The Eclipse forums have more tumbleweed than users. Stack-overflow also has very little info.
Con Poor feature discoverability
Con High effort to customize
A lot of time and effort is put in to make it specific to your needs.
Con Requires Brain Mode Switching
When editing in vim, you have you use the vim keys; when editing in every other window on your PC, or in Word or Excel or other application, you need to use the standard system key combinations. Learning the vim combinations can actually make you SLOWER at everything else.
Con Consume brain energy for editing that should be used for logic
Text editing in vim can be great once you've learned it, but it requires thinking about combination of commands. In other editors, you don't have to think about how to delete this part of code. You just think about how to implement a feature, what is a good design for this code. Even after you get used to using vim, it still requires your brain for editing.
Con Ambiguity in extensive documentation
Con Limited cross platform support
Neovim is not available for many legacy platforms
Con Split the VIM community
Moolenaar to be blamed for. If he opened up the development for vim to other bright minds, no fork would have happened. As it is mostly compatible with vim, it is not such a big issue.