it kind of has its own language.  once you finally reach the point where you give up trying to retain your ideas about good interface guidelines, and your matching assumptions about how you should be able to do things, then Eclipse slowly becomes more understandable.

it _is_ kind of powerful.  in much the same way that an ancient magical incantation, written in a strange language that no one can possibly speak, is powerful.  its powerful not so much because it can do anything at the moment, but more because you can see that if only you had a clue how to use it, you would incidentally have enough power to topple governments.

Right.

I still don't really understand "Perpectives".

they are basically a way to switch between context.

in older software they were called 'modes'

its not a _bad_ way to handle an overflow of gui options, but I think I prefer Microsoft's ribbons to Eclipse's modes.

The refactoring tools for Java alone are worth it.

I love Eclipse.

Is that spam?