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> in my experience Intellij looks better if you have coded in Inttellij first (especially Java) and then moved to othet tools. I have started with notepad and

> in my experience Intellij looks better if you have coded in Inttellij first (especially Java) and then moved to othet tools. I have started with notepad and moved through vi, Eclipse, VSCode and then IntelliJ. Out of these I used Eclipse and IntelliJ for Java and IntelliJ wins hands down when it comes to the quality of the features, atleast for Java. > Intellij offers a lot of custom behaviours that IMO programmers start coding the "Intellij way" (let's call it Intellij muscle memory for lack of a better definition) on the other hand going from vi to Emacs to Sublime to VSCode is less of a problem and people tend to honestly judge strength and weaknesses of each one. Since I didn't start with IntelliJ, I didn't have any baggage of muscle memory etc but the ease of refactoring and the quality of autocomplete/suggestions of refactoring takes it beyond an editor to almost a companion. It doesn't nag and you are free to ignore its suggestions but hell those are pretty good suggestions. I use a few keyboard shortcuts like jumping to definition and checking usage so I don't have any keyboard focused attachment to IntelliJ. Infact I use vi keybindings in both VSCode and IntelliJ. > Intellij git integration in comparison, in my opinion, it's barely usable and generally counter intuitive. IntelliJ's git integration is definitely not barely useable and not counter intuitive either (I started with command line git and then worked on IntelliJ). The only gripe I have is that occasionally I want to create a branch from a tag and I need to do that from the command line. Everything else works seamlessly. > If I had an euro for every time I had to "Invalidate cache and restart" on Intellij to make it recognize some trivial change, I would be rich now. I've had to do invalidate cache and restart about 2 times in last two years so while it is not a great use of my time when I have to do it, its not a big bother considering it is rare for me. > Intellij has a huge advantage in corporate environments where conformity, uniformity and easily replacing team members are paramount, VSCode is an highly customizable code editor that fits a different use case where each member of the team prefers to customize the working experience as much as possible. In my team, the average period folks have been with the firm is 3 years so easily replacing people is not a priority (because they are not leaving left, right and center). Also, I'm not even sure if that makes any difference, because its not like we are coding style nazis carrying out IntelliJ dictated formatting (we use Sonarlint for linting and only expect people to code in a manner that is easy to understand and maintain). Almost all team members have used Eclipse / VSCode and atleast for Java, after they used IntelliJ, they haven't gone back to either.

africanboy 6y ago
> Almost all team members have used Eclipse / VSCode and atleast for Java, after they used IntelliJ, they haven't gone back to either. I was also using it because my team was using it and it holds value to share a screen and watch the same thing or when debugging an issue replicating the same exact steps, having different tools can make it harder. My point is that when you have a stable setup any setup is good if it's good for you, Intellij is better on some things but worse on other that I personally value more the git integration for example, which works backwards compared to how git works: stage/commit/push in Intellij I am presented with all the tracked files already staged, the commit message box is already filled with the last one, files are showed as a tree instead of the classic list with paths and I have to look for untracked files that are collapsed by default. Magit is much simpler and intuitive IMO. > I've had to do invalidate cache and restart about 2 times in last two years so while it is not a great use of my time when I have to do it, its not a big bother considering it is rare for me. I wish it was like that for me. Or probably I am simply doing something wrong but no amount of Google fu helped me to avoid the issue, the only thing that works is pushing the damned "invalidate and restart" button (and sometimes running mvn idea:idea from the command line, but I gather it is obsolete and not actively supported anymore)

africanboy 6y ago

> Almost all team members have used Eclipse / VSCode and atleast for Java, after they used IntelliJ, they haven't gone back to either. I was also using it because my team was using it and it holds value to share a screen and watch the same thing or when debugging an issue replicating the same exact steps, having different tools can make it harder. My point is that when you have a stable setup any setup is good if it's good for you, Intellij is better on some things but worse on other that I personally value more the git integration for example, which works backwards compared to how git works: stage/commit/push in Intellij I am presented with all the tracked files already staged, the commit message box is already filled with the last one, files are showed as a tree instead of the classic list with paths and I have to look for untracked files that are collapsed by default. Magit is much simpler and intuitive IMO. > I've had to do invalidate cache and restart about 2 times in last two years so while it is not a great use of my time when I have to do it, its not a big bother considering it is rare for me. I wish it was like that for me. Or probably I am simply doing something wrong but no amount of Google fu helped me to avoid the issue, the only thing that works is pushing the damned "invalidate and restart" button (and sometimes running mvn idea:idea from the command line, but I gather it is obsolete and not actively supported anymore)