5 ms·

This post makes me very sad. I am often reminded that the best tech rarely wins. I've never had to use Intellij until my current job, but it is more obvious to

by sreque 9y ago

This post makes me very sad. I am often reminded that the best tech rarely wins. I've never had to use Intellij until my current job, but it is more obvious to me than ever than Eclipse, at least for Java development, is superior to Intellij. Was the free model not enough to sustain it, unlike Intellij, which sells its IDE, or is there another major cause for most of the world drifting to the inferior choice?

bdamm 9y ago
How is Eclipse better than IntelliJ? My experience with IntelliJ has been: * Faster than eclipse. * Works better / crashes less. * Less headaches setting up projects. * Far superior vi keymap support.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  And more/better keyboard shortcuts.
  - fma 9y ago
    Recently switched from Eclipse to IntelliJ. I've tried a few times in the past but I think I've reached the point of no return. More keyboard shortcuts! = better. In eclipse I probably used 10...still hunting for the equivalent. Then there's the fact that some shortcuts require two hands, or a large hand. If you're focused on debugging and you need to step out... Shift F8? Also the amount of times IntelliJ caches old files and screws up my testing is as much as eclipse... Which is probably my my biggest time waster. At least Intellij has the invalidate cache and restart... Which mostly works, till it doesn't, then I need to reimport.
- foepys 9y ago
  Most importantly plugins in eclipse never really worked for me. They often broke during updates, the package servers were slow or unavailable, or I had to wait weeks for plugin updates to update to a newer version of Eclipse. IntelliJ has almost all important plugins and languages built-in. Even some quite nice frameworks.
  - strictfp 9y ago
    I agree, but ironic considering that you are focusing on OSGIs main selling points :)
- badpun 9y ago
  I generally prefer IntelliJ to Eclipse, but what pains me in it is the slowness of the UI. When you open up a menu, you can literally watch as it is being painted to the screen. This is something that was instantenous on a 7 Mhz Amiga back in the nineties.
  - nickh9000 9y ago
    Maybe it is time to upgrade from that machine.
    - badpun 9y ago
      The machine is less than a year old... I'm betting the menu content is dynamic (based on preferences, maybe the code that's on the screen etc.) and they're recomputing the content before drawing it - but still, it's no excuse.
- chapill 9y ago
  Eclipse git support is superior as well as the pom editor.
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    But SourceTree is better than both.
    - chapill 9y ago
      Haven't used SourceTree. That may be true, but I prefer having all my tools in one place, and eGit is quite good. Besides, eGit has Eclipse Mylyn integration, which is another killer feature Idea doesn't have.
  - Tharkun 9y ago
    Really? I hate Eclipse git "support" with a passion. I don't want my IDE to go anywhere near my version control. I'll take care of that myself, thankyouverymuch. The fact that Eclipse makes it nearly impossible to disable that git "support" downright angers me.
    - zmmmmm 9y ago
      Impossible? You just go to the Team menu and choose "Disconnect" or am I missing something?
      - Tharkun 9y ago
        Yes. That's incompatible with my workflow. Projects are generated on the fly, each new project is automatically connected even if I don't want it to be. Having to manually disconnect each project is a pain. I just want a big "disable this plugin" button.
    - chapill 9y ago
      Close the git perspective? Right-click project, team -> disconnect perhaps? Honestly, I'm curious. It's never occurred to me that having it there, even if you don't use it, could be problematic. What is it touching that bothers you so much? It's not like it's going to jump in your folder and start committing stuff at random.
- sreque 9y ago
  Sorry. I haven't had a chance to reply all day. The biggest reason I think Eclipse is better is because it has automatic incremental compilation built in. This feature is an absolute game changer in productivity. Visual Studio doesn't have it for C#. Intellij doesn't have it. As far as I know, Eclipse is the only Java IDE that does. Think about it. As you are editing and saving, a real compiler is recompiling your code. Any and all errors show up as feedback in the IDE immediately. Intellij tries to guess errors for you, but I find that it often misses things until you run a build manually. In conjunction with automatic incremental compilation is the problems window. I can't find anything remotely like it in Intellij. In a single window I can see all the errors and warnings in my workspace and address them. This is tremendously helpful, for instance, when I'm doing a complicated refactoring that can't be completely automated. Another insanely awesome feature of this compiler is that it compiles class files with errors in them. This lets you do things like run your program even if there are compiler errors in your project, or, even more usefully, run a unit test. In Intellij I get so frustrated when I can't run a unit test because some entirely unrelated java file in an entirely separate module has a compiler error because I haven't refreshed my gradle project since pulling from git. I really like seeing the warnings too. In every Intellij-driven project I've seen people do not care at all about warnings and the result is a lot sloppier code, including way more code that uses raw types, code that performs unchecked generic casts, code that makes mistakes with serialization, etc. In this sense Eclipse encourages better coding practices by putting the warnings your face in the problems tab. I've had the opposite experience with plugins in Eclipse. I've found that there's way more plugins than in Intellij and that they work better. For instance, I completely gave up on Intellij's code coverage builtin plugin. It flat out wasn't working. On the other hand, the plugin I've tried in Eclipse works great. I've also found Eclipse's FindBugs and Checkstyle plugins to work way better for me. I really dislike how Intellij handles debugging and spawning sub-processes. I remember at $lastjob when I still used Eclipse and I was helping an Intellij user try to debug something. I helped him figure out that he actually had about 5 sub-processes running in a debugger already and they were conflicting with each other. This kind of mistake I think is much harder to make in Eclipse. I also love the debug perspective and how it is separated from the regular perspective. I could go on and on. I've found Eclipse to always be much snappier and more responsive than Intellij and to use less memory. I've found its code formatter to be more feature rich and useful. I like Eclipse's look and feel a lot better. Intellij uses Swing and it shows. But, at the end of the day, above all else, its the incremental compilation and everything that builds off of it. I have to use Intellij at my current job and I absolutely wish we could use Eclipse instead. I find for instance that Intellij leaks memory and I frequently have to restart it once it gets to 8+ GB of usage. Also If I give it less than 6 GB of heap it runs insanely slowly.
yodon 9y ago
If most people are shifting from a free product to a paid product the chances are most of those people don’t consider the paid product to be inferior
- nilsbunger 9y ago
  there's a free IntelliJ too
- fma 9y ago
  My company paid for licenses, but I wouldn't pay for it personally. Same with JRebel. So a better answer may be, they have been improving their sales team.
alyandon 9y ago
I was a huge fan of Eclipse back in the day when I heavily used it for (mostly) Java development. However, for me it was death by a 1000 cuts. Workspaces getting into non-functional states that required wiping/rebuilding. Update sites constantly being moved to new URLs that required me manually making configuration changes just so the Eclipse update mechanism would work instead of spitting out cryptic error messages. Updates breaking the IDE to the point that I had to reinstall and start fresh and reconfigure everything from the ground up. Update checks causing every core on a Core i7-2600 to go to 100% cpu usage and remain that way for 30+ seconds. When I switched to IntelliJ, I suffered from none of those problems and it did not take me long before I went and purchased a personal license.
Slackwise 9y ago
> unlike Intellij, which sells its IDE The fancy version costs money, yes, but the community edition is free and Apache licensed. Here's the source code: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community > is there another major cause for most of the world drifting to the inferior choice? I've used both Eclipse and IntelliJ, as well as JetBrain's "ReSharper" tool in Visual Studio, and while the UI is obviously different, and in some ways better, some ways worse than Eclipse, the actual functionality and feature set of IntelliJ is clearly superior to Eclipse, especially all the refactoring and code smell tools. The feature list is just incredible and constantly increasing: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/ https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/ Also, IdeaVim is way superior to Eclim, if you care about Vim keybindings and modal editing.
- richdougherty 9y ago
  I didn't know the free version was Apache licensed. That's great!
- ryukafalz 9y ago
  Unfortunately, Google's fork (Android Studio) is not open source. Previous versions of Android Studio (based on Eclipse) were. Clearest example I've seen in a long time of why copyleft licenses are important. EDIT: I was wrong about this, see below thread.
  - noarchy 9y ago
    You can find instructions on both getting the source code, and building from source here: http://tools.android.com/build http://tools.android.com/build
    - ryukafalz 9y ago
      Ah! I stand corrected. I wasn't able to find a link to that info anywhere from the download page (https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html). I was also confused before when browsing through Google's Android repos because they don't seem to do any development on the master branch: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/idea/+/master https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/idea/+/maste... ...instead developing on project or release-specific branches: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/idea/+/studio-master-dev https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/idea/+/studi... I have to say, I'm glad to have been wrong!
unclebucknasty 9y ago
Perspective is funny. Eclipse has always been a klunky, kludgey behemoth to me. Never enjoyed using it.
Lewton 9y ago
I’m baffled by how anyone could prefer eclipse to Intellij and got much glee from downvoting your opinion. But I’ll retract my downvote if you add any reasons for why you think eclipse is superior?
- 2sk21 9y ago
  I've happily been using Eclipse for years for Java development and have never used IntelliJ. I feel very productive in Eclipse and feel no urge to change.
  - hodgesrm 9y ago
    Same here. I don't see a big need to switch off Eclipse. It has all the features I need to be productive in Java.
- UncleEntity 9y ago
  > But I’ll retract my downvote if you add any reasons for why you think eclipse is superior? Because downvoting isn't intended to stifle someone else's perfectly valid opinion maybe?
  - Lewton 9y ago
    Downvoting is for posts that add nothing to the discussion? Which his post literally doesn’t unless he actually explains why he prefers eclipse
- mindcrime 9y ago
  I tried intellij and thought it was pretty crap. I don't remember all the things I didn't like, but I found it almost completely unusable.
- sreque 9y ago
  I responded to someone else who asked the same question in this thread. Can I have an update now? :)
guelo 9y ago
I don't get it either, I've used Eclipse and IntelliJ for about 5 years each and there are a lot of things that I think Eclipse does better. But whenever I come across a thread like this one people are just aghast at the thought IntelliJ is not superior in all aspects. So there must be something to it but I'm not sure what to make of it.
- strictfp 9y ago
  I find IntelliJ much better at navigation and refactoring.
megaman22 9y ago
For less than a dollar a day, access to the entire Jetbrains suite is a no-brainer.
strictfp 9y ago
Eclipse was awesome straight out of IBM, but IMO OSGI killed it of. OSGI is such a clunky framework to work with/around, I think it slowed down the devs enough to eventually make it outshined by others.
s73v3r_ 9y ago
" but it is more obvious to me than ever than Eclipse, at least for Java development, is superior to Intellij." This is a pretty huge claim. Care to share your reasoning?
vkou 9y ago
I can't count the amount of times I experienced an eclipse[1] in Eclipse. IntelliJ is snappy, has a far better search function, makes better use of screen space, lets me keep working while it compiles, and has yet to corrupt one of my projects. I've used both, personally, and for work, for a couple of years. I will take IntelliJ every time. [1] All the menus fading out, and becoming uninteractible, as it starts recompiling.

by sreque 9y ago

bdamm 9y ago

How is Eclipse better than IntelliJ? My experience with IntelliJ has been: * Faster than eclipse. * Works better / crashes less. * Less headaches setting up projects. * Far superior vi keymap support.

AnimalMuppet 9y ago
And more/better keyboard shortcuts.
- fma 9y ago
  Recently switched from Eclipse to IntelliJ. I've tried a few times in the past but I think I've reached the point of no return. More keyboard shortcuts! = better. In eclipse I probably used 10...still hunting for the equivalent. Then there's the fact that some shortcuts require two hands, or a large hand. If you're focused on debugging and you need to step out... Shift F8? Also the amount of times IntelliJ caches old files and screws up my testing is as much as eclipse... Which is probably my my biggest time waster. At least Intellij has the invalidate cache and restart... Which mostly works, till it doesn't, then I need to reimport.
foepys 9y ago
Most importantly plugins in eclipse never really worked for me. They often broke during updates, the package servers were slow or unavailable, or I had to wait weeks for plugin updates to update to a newer version of Eclipse. IntelliJ has almost all important plugins and languages built-in. Even some quite nice frameworks.
- strictfp 9y ago
  I agree, but ironic considering that you are focusing on OSGIs main selling points :)
badpun 9y ago
I generally prefer IntelliJ to Eclipse, but what pains me in it is the slowness of the UI. When you open up a menu, you can literally watch as it is being painted to the screen. This is something that was instantenous on a 7 Mhz Amiga back in the nineties.
- nickh9000 9y ago
  Maybe it is time to upgrade from that machine.
  - badpun 9y ago
    The machine is less than a year old... I'm betting the menu content is dynamic (based on preferences, maybe the code that's on the screen etc.) and they're recomputing the content before drawing it - but still, it's no excuse.
chapill 9y ago
Eclipse git support is superior as well as the pom editor.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  But SourceTree is better than both.
  - chapill 9y ago
    Haven't used SourceTree. That may be true, but I prefer having all my tools in one place, and eGit is quite good. Besides, eGit has Eclipse Mylyn integration, which is another killer feature Idea doesn't have.
- Tharkun 9y ago
  Really? I hate Eclipse git "support" with a passion. I don't want my IDE to go anywhere near my version control. I'll take care of that myself, thankyouverymuch. The fact that Eclipse makes it nearly impossible to disable that git "support" downright angers me.
  - zmmmmm 9y ago
    Impossible? You just go to the Team menu and choose "Disconnect" or am I missing something?
    - Tharkun 9y ago
      Yes. That's incompatible with my workflow. Projects are generated on the fly, each new project is automatically connected even if I don't want it to be. Having to manually disconnect each project is a pain. I just want a big "disable this plugin" button.
  - chapill 9y ago
    Close the git perspective? Right-click project, team -> disconnect perhaps? Honestly, I'm curious. It's never occurred to me that having it there, even if you don't use it, could be problematic. What is it touching that bothers you so much? It's not like it's going to jump in your folder and start committing stuff at random.
sreque 9y ago
Sorry. I haven't had a chance to reply all day. The biggest reason I think Eclipse is better is because it has automatic incremental compilation built in. This feature is an absolute game changer in productivity. Visual Studio doesn't have it for C#. Intellij doesn't have it. As far as I know, Eclipse is the only Java IDE that does. Think about it. As you are editing and saving, a real compiler is recompiling your code. Any and all errors show up as feedback in the IDE immediately. Intellij tries to guess errors for you, but I find that it often misses things until you run a build manually. In conjunction with automatic incremental compilation is the problems window. I can't find anything remotely like it in Intellij. In a single window I can see all the errors and warnings in my workspace and address them. This is tremendously helpful, for instance, when I'm doing a complicated refactoring that can't be completely automated. Another insanely awesome feature of this compiler is that it compiles class files with errors in them. This lets you do things like run your program even if there are compiler errors in your project, or, even more usefully, run a unit test. In Intellij I get so frustrated when I can't run a unit test because some entirely unrelated java file in an entirely separate module has a compiler error because I haven't refreshed my gradle project since pulling from git. I really like seeing the warnings too. In every Intellij-driven project I've seen people do not care at all about warnings and the result is a lot sloppier code, including way more code that uses raw types, code that performs unchecked generic casts, code that makes mistakes with serialization, etc. In this sense Eclipse encourages better coding practices by putting the warnings your face in the problems tab. I've had the opposite experience with plugins in Eclipse. I've found that there's way more plugins than in Intellij and that they work better. For instance, I completely gave up on Intellij's code coverage builtin plugin. It flat out wasn't working. On the other hand, the plugin I've tried in Eclipse works great. I've also found Eclipse's FindBugs and Checkstyle plugins to work way better for me. I really dislike how Intellij handles debugging and spawning sub-processes. I remember at $lastjob when I still used Eclipse and I was helping an Intellij user try to debug something. I helped him figure out that he actually had about 5 sub-processes running in a debugger already and they were conflicting with each other. This kind of mistake I think is much harder to make in Eclipse. I also love the debug perspective and how it is separated from the regular perspective. I could go on and on. I've found Eclipse to always be much snappier and more responsive than Intellij and to use less memory. I've found its code formatter to be more feature rich and useful. I like Eclipse's look and feel a lot better. Intellij uses Swing and it shows. But, at the end of the day, above all else, its the incremental compilation and everything that builds off of it. I have to use Intellij at my current job and I absolutely wish we could use Eclipse instead. I find for instance that Intellij leaks memory and I frequently have to restart it once it gets to 8+ GB of usage. Also If I give it less than 6 GB of heap it runs insanely slowly.

yodon 9y ago

If most people are shifting from a free product to a paid product the chances are most of those people don’t consider the paid product to be inferior

nilsbunger 9y ago
there's a free IntelliJ too
fma 9y ago
My company paid for licenses, but I wouldn't pay for it personally. Same with JRebel. So a better answer may be, they have been improving their sales team.

alyandon 9y ago

I was a huge fan of Eclipse back in the day when I heavily used it for (mostly) Java development. However, for me it was death by a 1000 cuts. Workspaces getting into non-functional states that required wiping/rebuilding. Update sites constantly being moved to new URLs that required me manually making configuration changes just so the Eclipse update mechanism would work instead of spitting out cryptic error messages. Updates breaking the IDE to the point that I had to reinstall and start fresh and reconfigure everything from the ground up. Update checks causing every core on a Core i7-2600 to go to 100% cpu usage and remain that way for 30+ seconds. When I switched to IntelliJ, I suffered from none of those problems and it did not take me long before I went and purchased a personal license.

Slackwise 9y ago

> unlike Intellij, which sells its IDE The fancy version costs money, yes, but the community edition is free and Apache licensed. Here's the source code: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community > is there another major cause for most of the world drifting to the inferior choice? I've used both Eclipse and IntelliJ, as well as JetBrain's "ReSharper" tool in Visual Studio, and while the UI is obviously different, and in some ways better, some ways worse than Eclipse, the actual functionality and feature set of IntelliJ is clearly superior to Eclipse, especially all the refactoring and code smell tools. The feature list is just incredible and constantly increasing: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/ https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/ Also, IdeaVim is way superior to Eclim, if you care about Vim keybindings and modal editing.

richdougherty 9y ago
I didn't know the free version was Apache licensed. That's great!
ryukafalz 9y ago
Unfortunately, Google's fork (Android Studio) is not open source. Previous versions of Android Studio (based on Eclipse) were. Clearest example I've seen in a long time of why copyleft licenses are important. EDIT: I was wrong about this, see below thread.
- noarchy 9y ago
  You can find instructions on both getting the source code, and building from source here: http://tools.android.com/build http://tools.android.com/build
  - ryukafalz 9y ago
    Ah! I stand corrected. I wasn't able to find a link to that info anywhere from the download page (https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html). I was also confused before when browsing through Google's Android repos because they don't seem to do any development on the master branch: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/idea/+/master https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/idea/+/maste... ...instead developing on project or release-specific branches: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/idea/+/studio-master-dev https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/idea/+/studi... I have to say, I'm glad to have been wrong!

unclebucknasty 9y ago

Perspective is funny. Eclipse has always been a klunky, kludgey behemoth to me. Never enjoyed using it.

Lewton 9y ago

I’m baffled by how anyone could prefer eclipse to Intellij and got much glee from downvoting your opinion. But I’ll retract my downvote if you add any reasons for why you think eclipse is superior?

2sk21 9y ago
I've happily been using Eclipse for years for Java development and have never used IntelliJ. I feel very productive in Eclipse and feel no urge to change.
- hodgesrm 9y ago
  Same here. I don't see a big need to switch off Eclipse. It has all the features I need to be productive in Java.
UncleEntity 9y ago
> But I’ll retract my downvote if you add any reasons for why you think eclipse is superior? Because downvoting isn't intended to stifle someone else's perfectly valid opinion maybe?
- Lewton 9y ago
  Downvoting is for posts that add nothing to the discussion? Which his post literally doesn’t unless he actually explains why he prefers eclipse
mindcrime 9y ago
I tried intellij and thought it was pretty crap. I don't remember all the things I didn't like, but I found it almost completely unusable.
sreque 9y ago
I responded to someone else who asked the same question in this thread. Can I have an update now? :)

guelo 9y ago

I don't get it either, I've used Eclipse and IntelliJ for about 5 years each and there are a lot of things that I think Eclipse does better. But whenever I come across a thread like this one people are just aghast at the thought IntelliJ is not superior in all aspects. So there must be something to it but I'm not sure what to make of it.

strictfp 9y ago
I find IntelliJ much better at navigation and refactoring.

megaman22 9y ago

For less than a dollar a day, access to the entire Jetbrains suite is a no-brainer.

strictfp 9y ago

Eclipse was awesome straight out of IBM, but IMO OSGI killed it of. OSGI is such a clunky framework to work with/around, I think it slowed down the devs enough to eventually make it outshined by others.

s73v3r_ 9y ago

" but it is more obvious to me than ever than Eclipse, at least for Java development, is superior to Intellij." This is a pretty huge claim. Care to share your reasoning?

vkou 9y ago

I can't count the amount of times I experienced an eclipse[1] in Eclipse. IntelliJ is snappy, has a far better search function, makes better use of screen space, lets me keep working while it compiles, and has yet to corrupt one of my projects. I've used both, personally, and for work, for a couple of years. I will take IntelliJ every time. [1] All the menus fading out, and becoming uninteractible, as it starts recompiling.