"Friendly" is not the word I would use. Powerful, sure. But IDEA breaks quite a few universal GUI concepts and that takes a bit to get used to.
For example, Ctrl-w is a very important keybinding on IDEA, one that I use all the time (it expands the selection to the enclosing expression). It's literally wired in my brain now. To the point that I now use it in Eclipse as well and I even started using it in other places (Sublime, etc...) and... closing the window as a result. Very annoying.
Another one is that Ctrl-n sometimes creates a new file (expected) and sometimes... something completely different depending on your current window. Again, not friendly. Optimized for development and a life saver on the long run, for sure, but it's fairly user hostile.
The non-standard default keyboard shortcuts bug me as well, but on the plus side they can be rebound.
The thing that frustrates me most in IntelliJ is that all of the dialog windows are modal for no apparent reason. Why can't I focus the main window or at least interact with it to change tabs, select text, etc when I have dialogs open?
"Find in Path" is a particularly obnoxious example: it's fairly common that I want to search for a string fragment, so I open the search dialog and set up my search context, then try to select text to copy as the search term, but I can't, so I have to start over.
I want to be able to interact with the editor at all times, though I could see locking it during complicated refactors to keep me from changing code while the IDE is trying to change it too (only while a progress bar dialog is visible).
Modal windows should be the exception, not the rule.
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To be clear I love IntelliJ. While I prefer simpler editors in many situations, I can't see myself going back to anything else for medium-to-large JVM projects (Scala especially). The modal niggle and a few other minor usability issues are small blemishes on an otherwise great IDE.
> The thing that frustrates me most in IntelliJ is that all of the dialog windows are modal for no apparent reason. Why can't I focus the main window or at least interact with it to change tabs, select text, etc when I have dialogs open?
Funny, as soon as you said that, I nodded and I immediately thought "For example, the universal search dialog should definitely not be modal". And then you follow with...
> "Find in Path" is a particularly obnoxious example
Totally agree and I'm surprised I missed it. Modal dialogs are not user friendly (and very old school UI).
I switched from Eclipse to IJ a couple months ago to match my team. Pretty happy that it comes with Eclipse key binding profile out of the box. Works pretty well.
I know, but that wasn't my point. I actually chose to keep Ctrl-w and extend it to other tools, because I use this functionality in an IDE much, much more often than closing windows.
It makes sense, but it's not user friendly, which is the point I was making.
Another annoying one is redo, they use ctrl+shift+z instead of ctrl+y. I've lost lots of code thanks to this after undoing something which i tried to redo but instead got the current code modified and the undo-stack wiped. (i might have been able to recover it in the local history but usually i'm too lazy to go dig so deep)
But IDEA differs from most software products in that it's one expert users will spent several hours a day using. Deviations from standard conventions are much easier to justify in this scenario than in most others.
About a year with eclipse and nearly two with IDEA now.
In terms of overall usability, speed, and stability IDEA is incomparably better. Yes, there are a few minor things that eclipse does better/IDEA can't do (so I keep reading). But this is hugely overshadowed by the fact that IDEA is a high-quality, well-supported professional-feeling product. In comparison, eclipse looks, smells, and acts like a kludgy, bloated, long-lived open source project.
The main important difference is that eclipse is free, and thus some folks seem to really go to bat defending it. There is a certain powerful frugality ethic among developers.
But really, if you're not going to get bent out of shape about spending a few bucks for a piece of software you spend many of your waking hours using, there is no serious comparison.
>IDEA is a high-quality, well-supported professional-feeling product. In comparison, eclipse looks, smells, and acts like a kludgy, bloated, long-lived open source project.
This times a million.
Though I do love open source both in principle and in many products, certain proprietary software tools are entirely worth paying for due to how much more productive they make you. IDEA is my prototypical example.
> IDEA is a high-quality, well-supported professional-feeling product. In comparison, eclipse looks, smells, and acts like a kludgy, bloated, long-lived open source project.
Proprietary, closed source development vs. Open Source software development in a nutshell.
I'm really glad a friend recommended IntelliJ IDEA to me. It's a great product. Having used both Netbeans and Eclipse on a rather powerful machine, the UI would lag. I don't like to wait for computers to finish computing things when I'm programming pretty much in just a text editor ("writing code mode")...which brings up another point - Atom is not a great text editor either because it is so UI laggy it slows down development.
Agreed. Switched to IntelliJ about 4-5 months ago. Haven't looked back since. Interestingly, what caused me to look at IntelliJ wasn't a lack of features in NetBeans, but rather the fact that still today NetBeans doesn't work properly on a retina MacBook Pro.
To elaborate, on a MBP Retina, you'll find that the UI lags slightly if typing fast, especially if a lot of syntax highlighting is happening on the screen. It does not happen if you are using NetBeans on an external monitor. The NetBeans team claims it's a Java issue, so in the end I just didn't want to wait anymore, and I downloaded IntelliJ.
One of my co-workers has a 5K iMac and definitely has this issue. I will have to test more carefully to see if this is also affecting me. Does not really matter because after reading this I am definitely moving to IntelliJ.
The only thing I don't like about IntelliJ vs Eclipse is unit testing. Because Eclipse eagerly compiles everything with its special compiler it seems to have a much faster startup time for unit tests. In fact with Eclipse I use JUnit as a Java repl because you can test a single method. Also I hate how I can't configure IntelliJ's gutter size. It feels massive. Other than that IntelliJ is far superior.
As for dark theme and theming Intellij/Eclipse both have their quarks (Eclipse being far more quirky).
Here is a screenshot of a personal port of the Atom One Dark theme (I love that theme) to both IntelliJ and Eclipse (left and right respectively): http://imgur.com/Myo4KxM
> Because Eclipse eagerly compiles everything with its special compiler it seems to have a much faster startup time for unit tests.
You can configure IntelliJ to behave similar, the option is disabled by default. Its the "Make project automatically" option in the "Build, Execution, Deployment -> Compiler" settings window.
Also, IntelliJ can use ejc if you like, the "Build, Execution, Deployment -> Compiler -> Java Compiler" window, the "Use compiler:" option.
I tried that before but its still faster in Eclipse by 3/4 of a second (I was wrong about being just the compiler). Its as though Eclipse doesn't fork a new Java process.
With all respect, I don't I understand your point. FTR, I'm also a developer in past and in present. If you have an argument in regard to actual points shared in my article, please share it with others.
The git "commit and push" workflow is less ergonomic than eclipse's - you have to wait for it to perform the commit and then ok another dialogue to do the push, rather than just hitting "commit and push" and letting it happen in the background.
There's no obvious way to search within a directory. I don't want to search everywhere which is the only option I see in ctrl-A. I want to be able to right click or similar on a directory in my project and search just in that directory.
I can't tell how to reorganize the UI. In Eclipse I have the Window > Views menu. In IntelliJ panels seem to appear and disappear arbitrarily as I invoke particular actions and I have no idea what rules it follows or how to control it. Edit: aha, there's a weird square in the very bottom left corner: having clicked that the tabs for the panels have appeared which makes it much easier.
No save button means I can't tell the IDE when not to try to compile. This is important when working on complex code (particularly Scala) and I know compiling it is going to take a few seconds of sluggishness.
The Scala presentation compiler (admittedly not really the subject of this article) has too many spurious errors (most prominently one I reported as SCL-9700).
Most importantly of all, continuous building simply isn't reliable enough. In eclipse, if I've hit save I can tell when the build has finished, and if the build has finished and there are no problems in the problems view then I am 100% confident that my code actually compiles. This simply isn't the case in IntelliJ (e.g. after renaming a class it won't necessarily complete the rebuild and so errors don't always show up until after you deliberately make).
Thank you for jumping in with this, because I completely agree that a list of advantages AND disadvantages, collected by people with both sets of preferences is more useful than a list of advantages written by the marketing manager of the product (although that is still quite useful).
That being said, as someone who uses IntelliJ frequently, I wanted to respond to a couple of your points:
> No obvious way to search within a directory
In the "project" pane (the place where it shows the folder structure of your files) just right-click on any folder and select "Find in Path" (Ctrl-Shift-F). Definitely an important feature, I use this all the time.
> I can't tell how to reorganize the UI.
You solved this yourself. ("aha, there's a weird square in the very bottom left corner...")
> No save button means I can't tell the IDE when not to try to compile [...] compiling it is going to take a few seconds of sluggishness
Interesting. My experience has been that the compiling just takes up background, low priority threads and doesn't interfere with my work -- I don't even notice it getting behind. I have never tried it with Scala code (which does a LOT more during the compile phase) so maybe it's more noticeable when doing that.
> continuous building simply isn't reliable enough [...] (e.g. after renaming a class it won't necessarily complete the rebuild...)
Curious. I never seem to encounter problems like this. I wonder why. Does the ability to trigger a make when you want it mitigate this somewhat?
> You solved this yourself. ("aha, there's a weird square in the very bottom left corner...")
Indeed. I think this whole thread is showing that the UI has a lot of surprising/nondiscoverable aspects though. It would be better if all the functionality was accessible via the main menus as a fallback.
> Does the ability to trigger a make when you want it mitigate this somewhat?
Ironically it would probably be better to get myself into the right habit if the continuous building were less reliable - it goes wrong rarely enough that I feel dumb insisting on a make every time, but if I start trusting it I get tripped up.
The key combination for make is relatively fiddly. Maybe I should try binding it to ctrl-S.
> There's no obvious way to search within a directory. I don't want to search everywhere which is the only option I see in ctrl-A. I want to be able to right click or similar on a directory in my project and search just in that directory.
Right-click on folder, "Find in path..." does exactly that, doesn't it?
It's not in the right-click menu (at least on the bar at the top, and I don't know how to make the panel on the left appear), but that does it, thanks! I assumed it would be called "search" since the startup background talks about "search", didn't think to look for "find".
On OS X it's cmd + 1, I'd guess ctrl + 1 for Windows? Or click the box in the bottom left which brings up panes for everything. You can also bind the keymap however you like, to make these panes accessible in commands you can remember
> There's no obvious way to search within a directory.
On OSX at least: CMD+SHIFT+F brings up the Find dialog. Scope defaults to Whole Project (ALT+H) but you can change it to Directory (ALT+O) which seems to default to the directory of the currently selected file. (Or maybe Scope actually defaults to the last one you used.)
I'm wondering what version of IDEA you tried that wasn't this way?
I don't run into compiler issues too often, but I also don't use shapeless or scalaz so I wouldn't be surprised if more complex type signatures give IDEA trouble. I have noticed a drastic improvement with the Scala support since IDEA 13 or so.
This was 15. I didn't think to look for "find" because "search" is advertised on the default background screen and I expected it to use the same word - per the cousin comment it's working now.
Sadly the Scala support is still quite unreliable at least at the presentation level - lots of spurious red in the editor - maybe better than it was. I use both shapeless and scalaz extensively.
I use JetBrains Webstorm, and on that hitting CMD+SHFT+F creates a search local to the selected folder in the directory tree. Seems pretty intuitive to me, but finding files themselves, as opposed to string constants and the like, is actually the more difficult thing Ive yet to figure out.
Ctrl-Shift-N gets you an "open file" dialogue that does slightly fancy filtering/searching (e.g. you can put a substring of the name and it'll find it).
> you have to wait for it to perform the commit and then ok another dialogue to do the push, rather than just hitting "commit and push" and letting it happen in the background.
There is a "commit and push" button. You have to hover your mouse over the Commit button in the Commit Changes window to see it.
I don't think it's improper for it to be pointed out that someone who works as the marketing manager for a product may have a slight bias towards talking up said product's benefits and downplaying its limitations.
It's just a fact, not a slight.
(And I say this as someone that happens to love just about everything this company puts out!)
I think Andrey took it not as "he is a marketing manager for JetBrains, so of course there is a bias", but rather: "he is just a marketing manager, and not a developer, so what does he know?" And with that line of thinking, the follow up question makes perfect sense. He's not just a marketing manager.
He's a marketing manager who responds with an argumentative tone to someone pointing out he is a marketing manager. There's a thing you don't see every day.
Argumentative tone? I didn't read that. Couple that with the fact that he might not be a native English speaker, I think it's a bit much to imply a tone.
An argument against the article was specifically solicited, even though it was orthogonal to the OP's point. That's not an implication, it's a statement. I'm not sure how else to read such a thing, frankly, native speaker or otherwise.
Edit: and not that I'm telling the jetbrains folks how to do their job, but a marketing manager who has communication difficulties in a given language generally isn't given the responsibility to make public company statements in that language.
Basically your objections aren't holding much water.
When there's two possible ways to read something, and one of them makes all kinds of sense and one of them doesn't, I think parsimony suggests we should believe the one that makes sense.
Sure, but that assumes you read it two possible ways.
And my interpretation makes perfect sense, especially if you consider the individual in question might not be a native English speaker. Seriously, I think people complaining about this are reading far too much into this. Chill.
I think that the point is that it would be a good practice to disclose that. In no way does it invalidate what you have to say (and by the way, I really liked having the nicely-written presentation of these features; this is something I'm bookmarking to show to people), but disclosing the potential conflict of interest makes it clear that you have nothing to hide.
If you are looking for something lighter weight to run java snippets checkout http://jpad.io I made it to avoid writing the usual class/main boilerplate when all I wanted was to write a few lines of code to explore something.
JPad looks like a IDE dedicated to learning new things in a programming language. Eg. you want to try java9 feature without creating new project, writing new class. Gonna try it today. Thanks.
I'm a long time user of Eclipse but recently have tried IntelliJ again, it's got some really nice features such as the inline values while debugging but by far the biggest annoyance is not being able to have multiple projects within a workspace.
At work I mainly work on two APIs that work closely together so in Eclipse I can have both open and just jump between the projects easily and at home I like to have all my scratch pad projects/ideas in one eclipse workspace so I can jump between them all easily.
I know there are kinda workarounds with modules but it doesn't really work well, if they allowed the ability for multiple projects in a workspace I'd jump ship but sadly it seems it'll never be supported (according to co-worker who is a die hard IDEA fan).
Same here. Not having multiple projects open is a total deal breaker for us. We have a couple of shared libs that go with our projects and not being able to have them all open together is painful.
I work around this by either checking the core libraries out into my new project folder, so ice got multiple copies around- and also I've got a core-Luba project that's literally all 12 core libraries we have that I can have open in one window with my other project open in another.
This may seem silly, but one of my main reasons for using IntelliJ over Eclipse is because it has a nice looking dark theme. I've tried using the dark theme on Eclipse, and on both Windows and OS X it had very bright scroll bars that clash with the dark editor.
I think my favorite keyboard shortcut in IntelliJ is double-tapping shift to get a really smart search to pop up.
Eclipse seems to take some its UI look and feel from the host operating system, resulting in a weird mish mash of conflicting colours and difficult to read text.
I ended up just settling for changing the editor colours (to my favoured Sunburst theme) and keeping everything else stock.
IDEA is great for dark themes though. No messing around getting everything consistent and readable.
IntelliJ and it's derivatives are excellent. I'm completely addicted to RubyMine as well. Just the ability to jump to method declarations in a big project has ruined me for any IDE that doesn't have it.
I've used IntelliJ, ReSharper, and RubyMine, and all have been best-in-class products.
The only thing I can complain about is that IntelliJ's Maven support is atrocious. Maybe I'm missing something but I've played around quite a bit and I just can't make it search Maven Central's catalog properly. I literally have to drop back into Eclipse to add dependencies. It's OK given that you usually set up your dependencies once and are OK for a while, but it's definitely out of step with how perfect everything else is.
At a startup I worked at, we had to switch back to eclipse from any IDE - netbeans, IDEA, emacs, vim because eclipse is the only one that can really get maven right.
The better question is, what is eclipse doing right that all the others can't?
Whereas I really don't like Eclipse's requirement that you have an Eclipse plugin for each Maven plugin you use -- I have found it much easier to work with Maven projects using IDEA than with Eclipse, especially on a team where not everyone wants to understand what's going on.
You have to download maven central index. Settings/Maven/Repositories, choose repository and click Update. It'll download huge file and then autocomplete will work.
Though honestly I never use this feature, I prefer to research library website or, if I'm looking for a latest version, use something like search.maven.org , it might not be the fastest way, but I'll be sure that I use correct version. Maven repository contains some outdated duplicates for popular library and it might not be obvious.
I've done that - it still doesn't display properly.
Like I said, I've played around a bit with it in Netbeans and Eclipse and I'm familiar with the idea of downloading the index before I can search. I can't make it work properly in IntelliJ. Is there a Youtube video of an install->index->download workflow somewhere?
I typically use vim, but this method jumping feature is one of the best features for jumping into a new or large project. I was wondering if there was any vim plugin for something similar?
Also - the Model dependency diagraming is phenomenal in RubyMine.
While my peers using emacs might disagree, I'd argue it's also by far the friendliest scala development env as well. I've used the community and ultimate edition for many years. CE is fine coupled w/ sbt for most anything you want to do and promises to remain free.
Yes, Scala-wise I prefer it to Eclipse (Scala IDE) by a wide margin. That said, my coworkers and I routinely experience Idea 'hangs' while working on our Scala projects. That's something I never experienced while working on large Java projects in Idea, and I'm curious whether it's because Scala (as a language) is harder on the IDE, or whether the Scala plugin needs more love, or...
Oh, and auto-import of SBT changes? Turn it off. Definitely turn it off.
> my coworkers and I routinely experience Idea 'hangs' while working on our Scala projects.
Same here. It sounds like my MBP is going to take off when it has to build it's indices or whatever. Would be nice if it didn't cane my machine so much but I guess it's all the type stuff and implicits, etc.
Other things I love about IntelliJ (in my case, Android Studio):
Code generation. Getting a bunch of getters and setters from a right click is nice sometimes. But more importantly is being able to go to a class definition, do an Alt + Enter, and create a test file for that class in the correct tests directory.
Auto-completion is very powerful. If you're trying to call a method on your AbstractBeanFactoryImpl, you don't need to start by "Abstrac", if there are other results with that preface. You can just try "abfi" and it will probably get the right result. Super useful when you have multiple variables that start with the same sequence of letters.
All the space-saving it does. Have a one line getter or setter? It will display those as one line (with highlights to let you understand they're actually three lines, brackets included). Even some common things like creating a Runnable in Android and overriding it's Run method. Replaces three lines with a straightforward: "Runnable myRunnable = () => {". Feels like you're programming in a less verbose language.
IDEs are either swaggering monoliths, where all complexity has been hidden away in a labyrinth of options- or a small basic set, that waits for you to be turned into such a custom tailored to your taste monstrosity.
Sad thing is, really new interesting features are rare. There is no deep learning IDE that watches you debug, and associates source code by changing variable X fixed bug in file Z via time of change correlation and instruction flow graph.
There is no real approach to layered responsibility. Meaning, a beginner should be allowed to change functions, but not add classes and interfaces to existing well structured code, without the author signing those "big" changes off.
This crucial "zoom out into algorithms and architecture" and drop back in to display details- still often happen via external tools, as the IDE is not able to abstract Information from the actual sourcecode away.
Finally - debugging and Unittests, these are actually highly automate-able task- yet here im stepping it, even though by now at least conditions can be attached to the various execution paths.
Finally, no ide has a "User" Simulation, to detect crappy requirement engineering before the whole thing is gone into software.
A proportioned team of simulated "persons" and "use-situations", that gets to traverse a draft of the gui and the workflow should detect hotspots and annoyances, and avoid a lot of unnecessary & expensive itteration.
Can it show multiple projects in the same winfow yet? And I don't mean by abusing the maven module set up, some of my projects use grails for example.
It's nice having my relevant Java, grails and php projects in one window, which eclipse is quite good at. A way to get multiple maven and grails in the same window is pretty much a must for me.
Does IntelliJ IDEA have an equivalent to Eclipse's Call Hierarchy view? It allows me to select a method, and get a tree view of code paths that call into it (recursively). I use it all the time and couldn't find it when trying to help a co-worker who was using IDEA.
I hate to say this but it takes 3 seconds to google this and find it on Stackoverflow.
If your on Mac its Ctrl-Alt-H and if your looking for Eclipse find references for intellij its Alt-F7. If your looking for mini outline mode (aka command-o in Eclipse) its command-F12.
I keep trying PyHarm and giving up. I've never been able to get it configured well for the way I work. So I keep going back to SublimeText with with Python IDE plugins.
Then I get frustrated with that workflow because it doesn't well working on remote servers and go back to VIM. Which I also can't seem to get comfortably configured.
So then I boot one of my macs into Windows for a while and use VS with Pyrhon Tools and get frustrated with Windows, and well . . . .
Sorry, I know this isn't about Python. I've just never found that jet brains products work well for me. I feel like I'm fighting with them. Maybe it's time to give it another shot.
I think it's very dependent on your programming style. Compared to Jedi in Emacs and Atom, PyCharm's symbol detection/jump to definition/refactoring is absolutely world class.
After learning the keyboard shortcuts for "Jump to Symbol"," Jump to File", and "Jump to Class" my productivity increased maybe 3 fold. Why should I remember where stuff is when the computer can do it for me?
I'd recommend turning off tabs and using split views though. You can get a lot of mileage if you tweak PyCharm (especially for web projects, where the HTML/JS/Typescript integrations help a lot)
Disclaimer: I'm the PyCharm Developer Evangelist. That said, I'd be interested to hear what stuff from ST you couldn't get going the way you'd like in PyCharm. In fact, I just wrote draft docs talking about migrating from text editors.
Also, if it helps, we just did a Getting Started nine-part series of screencasts, available on YouTube. Of course, if the part that isn't working for you doesn't get mentioned, then I need to add to the series.
I've written this article with one simple idea in mind – give for reading to everyone asking me to explain how IntelliJ IDEA is compared to other IDEs. Just now I've also realized that I can use it to explain what we're doing at JetBrains.
Please stop pretending you're not doing this for marketing. IntelliJ is all over "social media" (who would have thought you've already submitted this on Reddit, too [1]) and is constantly pushing a campaign for its products. That's very fine by me – but don't pretend it's not advertisement.
IntelliJ is also the only Python IDE that I am not allergic to. I normally just VIM, but when I am forced to use an IDE (e.g. pairing), I use IntelliJ.
(Curiously, I've found IntelliJ to be actually better for Python development than the Python-specific offering from the same company - PyCharm)
The Python plugin for IntelliJ is virtually the same as PyCharm. The plugin sometimes lags a bit behind the PyCharm version, while PyCharm sometimes lags a bit behind the IntelliJ IDE version, but in general, it's the same.
Of course, you get support for lots of other languages in IntelliJ that aren't available in PyCharm.
It's mostly the support for other languages and plug-ins, to be fair. For example, I have to write cucumber-style BDD tests for my Python projects sometimes, and I use the Behave framework for that. IntelliJ comes with a nice Behave plugin that allows me to ctrl+click on the step in the .feature file and it takes me straight to the Python code with the relevant step definition. This plugin is not available for PyCharm, for some reason.
I tried Python remote debugging from IntelliJ (14) and found that the needed debug-eggs are not included with the plugin (they are only in PyCharm kit). Not sure if it's a licensing issue or a bug - the option for Python remote debug is there, but there are no libraries.
Sounds like the helpers installation was botched, I haven't used the Python plugin inside IntelliJ since I have access to PyCharm as well - but I know PyCharm installs a ton of helpers inside the remote ~/.pycharm_helpers directory or something similar, might want to clear them out and after you reconnect to the remote interpreter it should reinstall them.
For example, Ctrl-w is a very important keybinding on IDEA, one that I use all the time (it expands the selection to the enclosing expression). It's literally wired in my brain now. To the point that I now use it in Eclipse as well and I even started using it in other places (Sublime, etc...) and... closing the window as a result. Very annoying.
Another one is that Ctrl-n sometimes creates a new file (expected) and sometimes... something completely different depending on your current window. Again, not friendly. Optimized for development and a life saver on the long run, for sure, but it's fairly user hostile.