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

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?