This was about three years ago, and the codebase was a huge Symfony project, in PHP. - IDEA understands bindings to Symfony's sprawling YAML configuration file

This was about three years ago, and the codebase was a huge Symfony project, in PHP. - IDEA understands bindings to Symfony's sprawling YAML configuration files. So jumping between PHP code using a config value and the YAML file defining the value is one shortcut/click away. And more, and more: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/phpstorm/symfony-support.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/phpstorm/symfony-support.html - Refactoring: even a small thing like renaming a variable, a method, a config value. Changes propagated through all affected files (with preview of changes). It's impressive even for dynamic languages like PHP: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/phpstorm/refactoring-source-code.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/phpstorm/refactoring-source-c... For languages like Java? Oooh, boy, see submenues on the left https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/refactoring-source-code.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/refactoring-source-code.... - Symbol search. You know a function name, you can't remember the file? Symbol search for the function name. It's fuzzy, too. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/searching-everywhere.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/searching-everywhere.htm... I think searching was the primary thing that drove people to try IDEA. And I've seen it again and again with emacs and vi users: they spend significantly more time searching for code than I do. Because most of the time the best you have grep/ag/ripgrep which just search through files as and leaves figuring out context to the user. - Usages. Shortcut/Cmd+Click on anything, see where that anything is used/invoked. Without searching. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/find-highlight-usages.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/find-highlight-usages.ht... That was another big thing that fascinated people. Very useful in large legacy projects. This is off the top of my head for that particular job. But in general, there are significantly more things like identifying errors and suggesting fixes, large-scale refactorings, understading the plethora of test frameworks and letting you run the tests however you like, debugger integrations, stepping through automatically disassembled code for Java and .net during debugging etc. etc.