For a very long time developing Grails applications in Eclipse using the Groovy-Eclipse-Plugin was everything but enjoyable for me. Matthias Käppler summed it up best when he wrote:
Grails and Eclipse: Not So Groovy
In fact I struggled to get the Groovy-Eclipse-Plugin installed those days, and after finally having done that I found out that developing Grails applications in Eclipse was really painful for me.
But now with the first pre-M1 release of the next version of the Groovy-Eclipse plugin many things are better than ever. I finally got around using Grails and Eclipse for some of my projects at work but on the Mac at home I still prefer the combination of TextMate and Console.app. I’m looking forward to the final release which should improve UI performance in Eclipse, especially when using Code Assist.