In a number of projects I have found Eclipse to be the best IDE. It has support for many languages, it is easy to work with and actually also quite easy to extend. Now, when I first tried it many years ago, I did not have the biggest computer and since I develop in a lot of different languages it did not take long before my Eclipse installation was so bloated with plug-ins that it could hardly start.
The lesson learned was that Eclipse should be kept slim - with a minimum of plug-ins. This in turns has made it impossible to develop anything than JAVA in it. I therefor ventured out and decided that my current machine could handle at least the PDT extension also. This was correct it could handle it. But the PDT had a different idea about what F11 (launch last launched in JDT) was used for and this ended up making me very angry.
Now, I knew that it was possible to have multiple workspaces (I have that already to keep my Java projects and websites apart). But I did not know that it was also possible to have separate setups with different sets of Plug-ins.
It took me a while to get it working, and I am properbly not doing it the right way, but it works very well. I now have a full functional Java-IDE, PHP-IDE, CPP-IDE and alternative Java-IDE. I rarely have to mix the languages in one project, and even if I did I could just create a new Eclipse setup and install the mixture of plug-ins needed.
So, the "code" (actually it is just a small shell-script but I guess you get the idea):
/opt/eclipse/eclipse \
-Xmx1024M \
-data /home/emanuel/sources/java/workspace/ \
-configuration "file:///home/emanuel/sources/java/workspace/Eclipse_Configuration"
As you can see, adding the -data makes it easy to start in a preselected workspace. Using -configuration instructs eclipse to use the given directory for settings files. Then all you have to do when installing plug-ins is to place them somewhere "special" for the given setup. The fact that the configuration directory is inside my workspace is just to ease things for me - it could be placed anywhere and be used for several workspaces.
