Comments on: IDE Feature Matrix

By: Mick

Mick — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:28:20 +0000

I’ll personally vouch that IDEA isn’t lacking parity in the death by papercuts department.

Missing feature on that matrix: need to sit with a patient power user to truly appreciate it. (All three score highly.)

By: William Pietri

William Pietri — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 02:15:11 +0000

Oh my god, that is exactly it.

I’ve been using IDEA forever, so I’m surely biased in its favor. But I’m not a total bigot, and every couple of years I end up giving Eclipse a try. I always do it with somebody who knows it well, and there are always a bunch of multi-hour sessions where they try to get the exact right combination of plugins and settings to make it not entirely awful to use.

Even at the end of that, even when they’re satisfied, Eclipse is still a usability disaster. Of course, developers can deal with that; if they got put off by a little technical difficulty, they’d have gone into telemarketing or something. But just because you can get used to the sound of jackhammers or the smell of cat pee doesn’t mean you should.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:49:08 +0000

Totally agreed, except IntelliJ 8.x on the Mac with Java 5 has been kicking my ass of late. Apparently has something to do with Apple hosing something in their mid-summer Java 5 update. 2-3 crashes per day, doesn’t matter what I’m doing. IntelliJ has to rebuild indexes after every one of these crashes. Gives me a real sad-face .

By: Bilal

Bilal — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:11:45 +0000

Firstly, i need to say , for a naive developer , eclipse might be more useful, however this does not change netbeans’ being much better than eclipse since it is more integrated and more humanist
Regards.

By: Dushyanth

Dushyanth — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:04:15 +0000

I was in a company where they had a very good infrastructure team. The custom Eclipse installation came with all required plugins installed (and unnecessary ones removed), shortcuts created. Eclipse was very productive.

Switched to IntelliJ for personal use as configuring all the plugins is a major pain in Eclipse. Too much wasted time and effort.

I still use Eclipse to read open source code though. I like it’s ability to manage multiple projects without choking.

By: Krish

Krish — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:25:21 +0000

I use both Eclipse (for Java) and Visual Studio (for .NET). The problem with Eclipse is that there is too much friction in getting things done. I am not saying you cannot be productive. You can, but let’s say you need to do something new in Eclipse you haven’t done before, it is frustrating how many hoops you have to jump through to get it set up. No pain after that, but I have ended up half-laughing, half-crying after figuring out how to set up some simple configuration.

By: Bob Lee

Bob Lee — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:23:20 +0000

I love IntelliJ. This new version means I don’t have to waste time disabling all the plugins I don’t want.

By: Shaun

Shaun — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:20:28 +0000

Agreed.

One of the most pleasurable experiences with IntelliJ IDEA is the fact that it doesn’t get in your way and lets you set up a project to work. Eclipse throws you at the mercy of the plugin eco system and they never play nicely together. I’m not saying you can’t get anything done with Eclipse. I am saying that you only have to focus on what you want to focus on when you use IntelliJ