Eclipse is an integrated development environment. It supports Java by default. It supports a variety of other languages through Eclipse plugins. The CDT Eclipse plugin provides C/C++ support. The Subclipse Eclipse plugin provides Subversion support. This is the Eclipse official web site.

Installing Eclipse

Linux Install

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install eclipse

Use Ubuntu Synaptic Package Manager, System | Administration | Synaptic Package Manager Enter Eclipse into the Quick search box. This will bring up the Eclipse package(s). Check the ones that need to be installed (???) then click the Apply button on the toolbar.

Mac Install

We generally don't use Eclipse on Macs. We use Xcode, TextEdit, vi, etc.

Windows Install

We generally don't use Eclipse on Windows. We use Visual Studio instead.

Using Eclipse

Eclipse is a quite powerful programming environment. As such its features can be very useful, but it also has a somewhat steep learning curve. It can be easy to do something accidently and not know what happened - close a window and not know how to get it back, etc.

When Eclipse is first run after installation it will prompt for a workspace to use. This is a directory where source projects are located (one sub-directory of the workspace directory for each project). By default this is called "workspace". You choose any directory you like for the Eclipse workspace, including a newly created directory (which you can do in a terminal window or a GUI file manager before answering the Eclipse prompt).