14 ms·

IntelliJ IDEA 12 Released

136 points by ConstantineXVI 14y ago

mahmoudimus 14y ago
I love JetBrains - those guys know how to build a product. I'm particularly interested to see how this starts to affect the other products like PyCharm, RubyMine, etc.
- JonAtkinson 14y ago
  As far as I can tell, the changes from IDEA 12 are already making their way into the EAP builds of the subordinate IDEs. Certainly it seemed that way from the most recent PyCharm EAP announcement: http://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2012/12/pycharm-2-7-eap-build-124-138/ http://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2012/12/pycharm-2-7-eap-bu...
- colin_jack 14y ago
  I would have said the same until I tried RubyMine last year. Slow, buggy, confusing UX...was glad to be done with it.
sigzero 14y ago
They launched a new website look too.
cgh 14y ago
I honestly can't understand why anyone would use Eclipse when the community version of IDEA exists, but hey.
- throwit1979 14y ago
  Momentum and apathy.
  - white_devil 14y ago
    And zealotry.
    - throwit1979 14y ago
      Except there's nothing Eclipse offers that anyone could become zealous about.
      - white_devil 14y ago
        It doesn't need to. It's enough to be open source.
        cgh 14y ago
        The community version of IDEA is open source and Apache licensed, so hopefully people aren't seriously using that as an argument.
        tmarthal 14y ago
        Everyone uses Eclipse/SpringTool Suite(STS) for spring/grails application development or for projects using gradle as a build tool. One of the main features of this release (version 12) is the upgrade of the Spring integration, so maybe IntelliJ will become useful to the Spring Java crowd. Note that the community version of IntelliJ doesn't have this Spring support (nor the javascript IDE capabilities).
      - konradb 14y ago
        I've seen a belief that because IDEA isn't permissively licensed it has ideological impurity and shouldn't be used. Perhaps people take that to the point of zealotry.
        sigzero 14y ago
        There are always #those# people surely.
  - taligent 14y ago
    Eclipse is simply better for many use cases. But thank you for your condescension.
- konradb 14y ago
  A few years back I started doing work for a company where Eclipse was the standard (familiar huh!). I spent six weeks feeling like I was an unproductive failure until I gave up and unilaterally decided that I had to go back to Intellij otherwise I'd go insane. I really tried. It didn't seem to be built to work in the same way my brain did. I bet it has improved loads since I last used it, and hopefully my brain would deal with it better, but I live in fear of ending up in a situation where it is mandatory to use it and I had to take the job for financial reasons. Well, living in fear is an overstatement. I'm sure I'd learn, with a kind of weary resignation and resentment. Has anyone been put in such a position? The only times I've since been put in a place with loads of Eclipse where you have to use locked down client machines such as financial institutions, I've just said, I need Intellij, and it has been fine, thankfully.
  - morsch 14y ago
    I've been in exactly your position. I was a huge fan of IntelliJ IDEA, to the point that I raved about it in the (very informal) interview. They were using Eclipse. Adapting wasn't all that difficult for me, much more stuff is similar than different between the two. I think Eclipse is fantastic these days, enabling rapid navigation of huge codebases and helping me to understand unfamiliar code. The refactoring tools are also fantastic and I use them constantly, ie. regular development includes frequent refactoring. But I'm sure I'd be really happy with IntelliJ, too. I still think it looks a lot better, Eclipse could really do with a drastic facelift; the most recent release just makes things worse.
    - konradb 14y ago
      I really should take it for a spin again and find if I find it as intolerable as I did then, as an exercise in keeping flexible. I'm not usually inflexible, I'm happy flipping back and forth between very different development environments usually. As we've seen there are people who feel just the opposite as me in the thread too, no doubt it is partially down to how one builds mental models and how well they fit the abstractions chosen in both IDE's for various concepts.
    - myko 14y ago
- mynameishere 14y ago
  I've used it and couldn't figure out the allegedly big advantage.
- nickmain 14y ago
  Some of the plugins I would need (e.g. Haxe support) require the premium version.
- taligent 14y ago
  Why I use Eclipse ? It has much, much better plugin support e.g. AWS, Google CodePro. If you use the slightly older version then it is an order of magnitude faster than IntelliJ and generally works much nicer on OSX. It is also less cluttered meaning more room for code for those on laptops. Also IntelliJ's indexing of files on startup is completely insane. It maxes out my CPU for at a minute or so which is never good on a laptop. IntelliJ is nice and I use it at work but it is hardly some amazing piece of engineering that its supporters love to tell me it is. In fact I have found it to be generally quite buggy.
  - timdorr 14y ago
    One of the new features is better performance, particularly with indexing: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/ http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/ It might be worthwhile to give it a try just for that feature alone.
    - ghfghg 14y ago
      He already told you it stinks man. Don't be so annoying.
  - wyclif 14y ago
    By the "slightly older version", which version number do you mean?
    - georgemcbay 14y ago
      I am not the parent poster, but I would assume he's talking about using Indigo (3.8.x) and not Juno (4.2.x). Eclipse took a speed hit with Juno. A hit which seems to vary depending upon your system from "a bit slower" to "OMG, how can anyone use this"? On the Core i7 Windows laptop box I use for work, it fell into that "OMG, how can anyone use this?" category and I'm still using Indigo. Google "eclipse juno slow" and you'll see a ton of hits. I know they've been taking steps to address this partly by using funds Google donated to Eclipse for the purpose of having more test machines to deal with this specific issue, but I haven't had a compelling reason to see if newer releases of Juno really fix the problems for me.
- ngd 14y ago
  One thing I miss from Eclipse, for Java development, is the ability to run unit tests (or a whole program for that matter) while compilation errors exist in the code. Intellij forces me to make all my code compile before I can try out anything - I believe I do less iterative development and make less exploratory changes to code when using Intellij because of this. I've found I can live with it, and do, because my team uses Intellij, but I sure do miss executing code that won't compile. If you have never seen this feature of Eclipse, I encourage you to try it.
  - sigzero 14y ago
    Suggest a feature enhancement with the Jetbrains folks for it.
    - quicksilver03 14y ago
      They have already implemented it in IDEA 12, if I'm reading their website correctly. Which personally I think was a waste of development time, I cannot imagine how it could be useful to keep compilation errors in your code.
      - ngd 14y ago
        I tried it out, you can now make an Eclipse like experience, albeit requiring many key presses to invoke compiliation and execution of code. It's not as slick as Eclipse, but its possible. As for the merit of the technique - try it out. I've found it allows a level of experimentation not possible without the option; personally I've found that useful when it is not obvious what the right thing to do is upfront, I can try out a small change to a chunk of code, try it out via unit tests, then update all call sites appropriately; as opposed to attempting to "upgrade" call sites appropriately using a canned refactoring before I've validated whether or not I'm going to be able to achieve what I want for a few test cases.
- shortlived 14y ago
  Structural search & replace That one is pretty important for me. In general, Eclipse works pretty good. And it looks incredible when compare to NetBeans and other free IDEs.
  - MBCook 14y ago
    Do you know of any good guides on how to use it? I know it's there but the last time I took at look at it it looked like I was going to have to spend a bunch of time to figure it out.
    - shortlived 14y ago
      1. Everything is organized around "perspectives". A perspective is a set of views organized to help you perform a certain task. E.g. Java (coding), Debugging, CVS, etc. You can customize any perspective as you see fit. I use Java and Debugging. They took me a while to get used to, but in the end it's a very helpful construct. Don't just make one huge 'everything' perspective. Instead throw them on hot keys (alt-1, alt-2) and just switch back and forth as needed. 2. The editor and other UI widgets (proj/file trees) provide a lot of information on the state of your world via various decorations. Example - you have a Java file open. It has compilation errors. Those errors will be highlighted in the "overview" margin. This shows as colored marks on the side of the editor. They are used to quickly navigate to different things. This specific example are called Annotations in eclipse parlance. The same decorations are provided at file and project level. So, at a glance you can see if project has errors and as you drill down, it's easy to locate which dir/package has errors, etc. 2a. If you put your cursor inside of a variable, type, etc it will highlight all instances/references of said thing in the overview margin. super handy. 2b. The same goes for CVS annotation (or more general "team" annotation). Even though this is buried in my list, it might be my favorite feature. You get line by line annotations (colored by age) and you can link this margin to a history window. Click on an annotation to see full history entry in window below. Killer. 3. Useful commands: CTRL-SHIFT-G (find occurences) and CTRL-t (open type), CTRL-r (open resource), CTRL-o (open field/method) and .... i forget the key sequence but the command to open class heirarchy. Those are my main ways to navigate. Open type/resource takes wildcards. Use them. 4. All of the above allows me to work with a reduce UI, sometimes, many times in full screen mode. 5. Understand that Eclipse uses it's own compiler. If you compile outside of Eclipse (ant), then those class files are thrown out and recompiled when eclipse is run again. You can get the eclipse compiler as standard jar and it works great with Ant and the like. If you have a mixed environment, then you def need to look into that.
- andrewcooke 14y ago
  has the c plugin been resurrected? last time i looked, it was dead. which is a pretty major gap in an ide (i buy each release of intellij idea and use it for python, java, clojure, but i still switch to eclipse for c). nope - still dead - http://plugins.intellij.net/plugin/?id=1373 http://plugins.intellij.net/plugin/?id=1373 http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA- http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA- (also, the very latest eclipse looks really clean - i was surprised and impressed when i started it up the other day).
  - nevster 14y ago
    Give AppCode a try - although it's mainly for Objective-C, it has good support for C and C++ http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/whatsnew/index.html http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/whatsnew/index.html
    - andrewcooke 14y ago
      hi - i've got the 12 ultimate edition idea and am trying to work out what plugin would contain the appcode functionality (my impression is that other intellij products are basically intellij idea plus a hard-wired plugin - pycharm is like the intellij idea python plugin, for example). but i'm having a hard time finding an objective c plugin. do you have any idea what it might be called? thanks.
      - eropple 14y ago
        I think AppCode is the exception to that tendency. I've never been able to get it to do as you'd like.
      - nevster 14y ago
        AppCode is the exception to the rule. It's a totally separate app that only runs on Mac OS X. None of it's features are available in IntelliJ. (Having said that, a lot of the base IDE remains the same so the general UI and keystrokes carry over).
- ghfghg 14y ago
  Because is not much better than eclipse. In fact, it is a bit worse.
  - MBCook 14y ago
    Would you like to explain how? I use IntelliJ every day, and I've found it to be fantastic. When I switched about two years ago, I was happy I switched within a few days (although at this point I don't really remember why I found it to be so much better).
- SCdF 14y ago
  I honestly can't understand why people love IDEA so much. I know lots of people who swear by it, but absolutely none of them can articulate why. Often they say Eclipse sucks, which is completely ignoring the question, and usually doesn't come with any substantial explanation of the supposed suckage. Moreover, talking about how one thing sucks and then silently comparing it to something else implies the other thing has no flaws, which is clearly unfair and stupid. The only positive non-eclipse-hating arguments I've heard is that it's "easy to use" or "slick", both of which aren't useful to me since I'm familiar and comfortable with Eclipse's user experience. The rare time a feature is mentioned it's something Eclipse has as well. I've tried to learn it a few times but since no one has been able to articulate any good reason to use it past a kind of anti-eclipse zealotry I haven't spent more than a few hours on it. I'm not saying it's stupid to like IDEA, I'm saying that I think that preference in this case comes down to wishy washy things like 'feel', which is entirely subjective and entirely inarguable. I will say this, I've heard plenty of IDEA users be snarky and condescending to people who use Eclipse (I've recently changed jobs and now work in a place seething with them), and I've not once seen it the other way. Anicdata I know, but that is life.
  - elehack 14y ago
    Ridiculous attention to detail. It isn't the big things, mostly, that draw me to IDEA (though some of them, like the way it handles projects and that Maven Just Works, help a lot), but the thousand little things that someone, somewhere, got right that you don't think about. Unless I think about it, I just notice that the overall experience is somehow more pleasant. Stuff like what comes first in autocomplete (Eclipse's quality in this regard has been somewhat inconsistent). Refactor suggesting intelligent names for variables based on their types. And then there's the theming. Normally, Swing apps are somewhat ugly and generally obnoxious. The JetBrains folks have put together a Swing LaF that's beautiful and compact, which also contributes to the overall experience just being pleasant. I'm happier using IntelliJ.
    - mtrimpe 14y ago
      ^ this For example; for some reason Flash pretty much always crashes when you're pausing the VM (stepping through commands) for too long, but it's impossible for the IDE to detect that. That meant that every time this happened you would need to first stop the debugger and start it again. In IntelliJ IDEA 12, only for Flash, the debugger's start button now turns into a 'restart' button which does just that in one click. It might be a tiny detail, but somebody actually looked at my specific use case and added an improvement for it which is quite an amazing level of attention to detail.
- tieTYT 14y ago
  I use IDEA and not eclipse, but for the last 2 versions of IDEA it seems to get more and more buggy and feature wise, eclipse seems exactly the same. Then of course there's the obvious reason that with the community edition there's no appserver support. Eclipse has that. At this point I'd use eclipse if I was familiar with it. I'm just too used to the key mappings of IDEA to deal with the switch over.
- _casperc 14y ago
  I use Eclipse simply because it allows me to have multiple projects open in the same workspace and search for files/classes across all projects. When Idea gets that feature I'll probably take another look at it.
- coliveira 14y ago
  I have used both IDEA and Eclipse recently. My opinion is that IDEA has very interesting tools, but when viewed as a complete platform Eclipse deliver the best experience. There are some things that IDEA does better than anyone else, but the editor itself is mediocre. For example, the UI is too complicated, and the tabs are terrible to use. The number of plugins is also much smaller than available for Eclipse. If you are happy with what IDEA delivers out of the box, then it is probably the best for you. Otherwise, I would should just stick to Eclipse because it offers better options in general.
famousactress 14y ago
A lot of people find a dark look and feel much less distracting. Now that we’ve added it, you can focus more on the code and less on the IDE. (Above screenshot: http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/darcula-1.png http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/d... ) I can't tell if we're being punk'd. I'm expected to take that screenshot as an example of a less distracting user interface for creative work? My condolences to anyone using the presumably more distracting previous version.
- epidemian 14y ago
  The screenshot shows a debugging session. Both the debugging panel at the bottom and the project panel at the left can be collapsed. So it's not that bad. But in general, yes, i agree in that Intellij IDEA's interface is quite overloaded. I haven't tried any language-specific version of the IDE, like PhpStorm or PyCharm; maybe those are less loaded, IDK.
  - Joeri 14y ago
    Phpstorm user myself, it's as overloaded, but having used most of the competing IDE's I think Phpstorm is one of the cleanest / lightest.
- chillax 14y ago
  Here's a bit less cluttered one.. http://imgur.com/rhZQZ http://imgur.com/rhZQZ With the search for class/file/symbol navigation it is usually possible to live in this mode most part of the day :-)
  - famousactress 14y ago
    Oh thank goodness. I'll hold off on setting up the relief fund then :)
  - acavailhez 14y ago
    With the "Alt double tap and hold" keyboard shortcut, you can even remove all the side buttons
chillax 14y ago
The new compiler mode is very good. Non-intrusive and it really speeds up things, especially on a non-ssd-disk.
- cgh 14y ago
  Since you have obviously used the new version, can you comment on how compatible it is with projects created in v.11? Do we have to recreate the entire project, or will it import them as-is?
  - Watabou 14y ago
    It imported v11 projects just fine for me.
  - mmorett 14y ago
    I was able to use it at the same time I had IDEA 11 up with both using the same project. It was interesting. Every time I'd switch to the other IDE window, each one detected some changes to the project structure and wanted to reload it. Otherwise, it was very transparent. No pain at all.
flyhighplato 14y ago
I want to like IntelliJ IDEA so so much. In the same way that I want my primary computer to run Linux and all my code to be in some dialect of Lisp.
- rkalla 14y ago
  Same thoughts here... been trying to move exclusively over to IJ since 4.x series but two (really dumb) things send me back to Eclipse every time: Javadoc formatting and Web Project module support. I mean "really dumb" in the sense that these things shouldn't be so important to me, but as someone who writes a novel's worth of documentation inside his code, subpar Javadoc formatting doubles my workload. The project model thing is my own problem trying to mentally map the whole project/module/artifact abstraction IJ has... I don't understand it, never have, doesn't seem intuitive and mostly just frustrated me. I think more of this has to do with the layout of the project properties dialog than anything combined with my own mental reluctance to understand what they are proposing here. That said, the code quality of the product seems to be excellence. Very smooth, no surprise exceptions during use (Which is par for the course in Eclipse). Some day I'll sit down and figure it out, but until then I will continue to be confused and stick to my simple, flat, POM-defined life in Eclipse and cry every time I load up 4.2 and wonder why I am doing this to myself (if you haven't used Eclipse 4.x series yet, you don't understand how much pain there is waiting for you).
  - white_devil 14y ago
    > if you haven't used Eclipse 4.x series yet, you don't understand how much pain there is waiting for you Wow. I thought Eclipse would have gotten better along the years. Back when I switched to IDEA at version 4.x, the difference between them was like night and day - IDEA was so much better. Could you tell me a bit about the pain of Eclipse? It's quite surprising if they haven't managed to produce a solid IDE yet. I agree that IDEA's way of organizing things is kind of clunky. In a way, a "project" can be thought of as "metadata about stuff I'm working on", instead of the more intuitive "a project is a directory on my hard drive". Once you set up a project, you can then bring stuff into it with "modules". For example, you may want to include source code trees and/or JARs from multiple locations.
epidemian 14y ago
I've been using the Android UI editor in IDEA 12 EAP for quite some time and it's been really pleasing to use, especially for a first release of such a complicated component. [OT] It is, however, very stupid and frustrating that an IDE has to recreate all the Android drawing and layout engine just to show a static view of what your screen will end up looking like. Compared to the experience of web development where you can edit the living DOM model and see the changes in real time because there's no difference between coding time and running time, the Android UI experience feels very arcane :(
tuananh 14y ago
AppCode EAP got dark theme too if you're an Obj-C kind-of-guy
garblegarble 14y ago
I've tried IDEA briefly a few times but what gets me is the lack of an error pane that's as compact and descriptive as the one in Eclipse - the pain of using Eclipse 4.x is tempting me to ignore that limitation, however. Does anyone know if it's possible to get this in IDEA? http://i.stack.imgur.com/1kTPd.png http://i.stack.imgur.com/1kTPd.png I know it's possible to get some of it with inspections but what I really want is something that combines errors+warnings together and gives me instant feedback. Am I just missing something that's really there?
- haakon 14y ago
  A million times this. Your screenshot doesn't show it, but Eclipse's error pane shows all errors and warnings from all source files in the project. This is very useful and not possible in IDEA or NetBeans. So it's easier to overlook errors and I never have the same feeling of knowing about things that need attention in my projects.
- nevster 14y ago
  Analayze->Inspect Code... Shows both errors and warnings
manish_gill 14y ago
I wish the Community edition would support the Python plugin. Currently, if you want to develop in Python, you can't use the Community edition. :(
- Roybatty 14y ago
  And if every plugin was supported in the community edition, they would be out of business.
wildranter 14y ago
Looks nice, but... Is it any faster on Mac?
- yrral 14y ago
  Yes! The compiler now runs in a different process from the main IDE. This actually makes a huge difference. Interacting with the editor is now instant, projects compile faster, and the IDE uses less memory. For more details: http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2012/06/brand-new-compiler-mode-in-intellij-idea-12-leda/ http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2012/06/brand-new-compiler-m...
  - wildranter 14y ago
    Great! That's just what I was looking for to try again this awesome IDE. Thanks for the input!
tharshan09 14y ago
God i love the phpStorm IDE so much, I was a user of the text editors for a while. But the debugging support in this ide for PHP is just amazing. It integrates with mercurial nicely too. The recent black color scheme is just a nice surprise. Well worth the price.
martinced 14y ago
No harmt meant but I'm SCJP since more than 10 years and have been both a long time IntelliJ (still have IntelliJ version 4 installation files backups on CDs, found them yesterday) and a long time Eclipse user and I'm now using Emacs. I know, I know: Spring, refactoring, ORM + XML hell and whatnots for hundreds of K's codebase of 'enterprisey' stuff doing really not much... But as a now long-time Emacs user (since a few years) watching IntelliJ vs Eclipse fight looks a bit like like Lada vs Yugo car owners fighting about who has the best car ; )
- Roybatty 14y ago
  Whatever floats your boat. I bet you would be happy using notepad to write Java too. Eclipse might be Yugo, but using Emacs to write Java is like using Fred Flinstone's car. Hope you got thick callouses ;)
Cieplak 14y ago
my ideal java ide: http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/img/screen-java-dark.png http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/img/screen-java-dark.pn...
- c4n4rd 14y ago
  Could you share your color schema info? Thanks
  - ptomato 14y ago
    http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
sparx 14y ago
great ui, super fast compiling, indexing, best java ide ever
Flow 14y ago
How to make IntelliJ/WebStorm et al look less cluttered: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEwjDeof1ak&feature=youtu.be&hd=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEwjDeof1ak&feature=youtu...
manishsharan 14y ago
Could someone please comment support for Clojure ? The last time I tried , I did not find La Clojure to be any better than Eclipse + counterclockwise .

136 points by ConstantineXVI 14y ago

I love JetBrains - those guys know how to build a product. I'm particularly interested to see how this starts to affect the other products like PyCharm, RubyMine, etc.

JonAtkinson 14y ago
As far as I can tell, the changes from IDEA 12 are already making their way into the EAP builds of the subordinate IDEs. Certainly it seemed that way from the most recent PyCharm EAP announcement: http://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2012/12/pycharm-2-7-eap-build-124-138/ http://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2012/12/pycharm-2-7-eap-bu...
colin_jack 14y ago
I would have said the same until I tried RubyMine last year. Slow, buggy, confusing UX...was glad to be done with it.

sigzero 14y ago

They launched a new website look too.

cgh 14y ago

I honestly can't understand why anyone would use Eclipse when the community version of IDEA exists, but hey.

throwit1979 14y ago
Momentum and apathy.
- white_devil 14y ago
  And zealotry.
  - throwit1979 14y ago
    Except there's nothing Eclipse offers that anyone could become zealous about.
    - white_devil 14y ago
      It doesn't need to. It's enough to be open source.
      - cgh 14y ago
        The community version of IDEA is open source and Apache licensed, so hopefully people aren't seriously using that as an argument.
        tmarthal 14y ago
        Everyone uses Eclipse/SpringTool Suite(STS) for spring/grails application development or for projects using gradle as a build tool. One of the main features of this release (version 12) is the upgrade of the Spring integration, so maybe IntelliJ will become useful to the Spring Java crowd. Note that the community version of IntelliJ doesn't have this Spring support (nor the javascript IDE capabilities).
    - konradb 14y ago
      I've seen a belief that because IDEA isn't permissively licensed it has ideological impurity and shouldn't be used. Perhaps people take that to the point of zealotry.
      - sigzero 14y ago
        There are always #those# people surely.
- taligent 14y ago
  Eclipse is simply better for many use cases. But thank you for your condescension.
konradb 14y ago
A few years back I started doing work for a company where Eclipse was the standard (familiar huh!). I spent six weeks feeling like I was an unproductive failure until I gave up and unilaterally decided that I had to go back to Intellij otherwise I'd go insane. I really tried. It didn't seem to be built to work in the same way my brain did. I bet it has improved loads since I last used it, and hopefully my brain would deal with it better, but I live in fear of ending up in a situation where it is mandatory to use it and I had to take the job for financial reasons. Well, living in fear is an overstatement. I'm sure I'd learn, with a kind of weary resignation and resentment. Has anyone been put in such a position? The only times I've since been put in a place with loads of Eclipse where you have to use locked down client machines such as financial institutions, I've just said, I need Intellij, and it has been fine, thankfully.
- morsch 14y ago
  I've been in exactly your position. I was a huge fan of IntelliJ IDEA, to the point that I raved about it in the (very informal) interview. They were using Eclipse. Adapting wasn't all that difficult for me, much more stuff is similar than different between the two. I think Eclipse is fantastic these days, enabling rapid navigation of huge codebases and helping me to understand unfamiliar code. The refactoring tools are also fantastic and I use them constantly, ie. regular development includes frequent refactoring. But I'm sure I'd be really happy with IntelliJ, too. I still think it looks a lot better, Eclipse could really do with a drastic facelift; the most recent release just makes things worse.
  - konradb 14y ago
    I really should take it for a spin again and find if I find it as intolerable as I did then, as an exercise in keeping flexible. I'm not usually inflexible, I'm happy flipping back and forth between very different development environments usually. As we've seen there are people who feel just the opposite as me in the thread too, no doubt it is partially down to how one builds mental models and how well they fit the abstractions chosen in both IDE's for various concepts.
  - myko 14y ago
mynameishere 14y ago
I've used it and couldn't figure out the allegedly big advantage.
nickmain 14y ago
Some of the plugins I would need (e.g. Haxe support) require the premium version.
taligent 14y ago
Why I use Eclipse ? It has much, much better plugin support e.g. AWS, Google CodePro. If you use the slightly older version then it is an order of magnitude faster than IntelliJ and generally works much nicer on OSX. It is also less cluttered meaning more room for code for those on laptops. Also IntelliJ's indexing of files on startup is completely insane. It maxes out my CPU for at a minute or so which is never good on a laptop. IntelliJ is nice and I use it at work but it is hardly some amazing piece of engineering that its supporters love to tell me it is. In fact I have found it to be generally quite buggy.
- timdorr 14y ago
  One of the new features is better performance, particularly with indexing: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/ http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/ It might be worthwhile to give it a try just for that feature alone.
  - ghfghg 14y ago
    He already told you it stinks man. Don't be so annoying.
- wyclif 14y ago
  By the "slightly older version", which version number do you mean?
  - georgemcbay 14y ago
    I am not the parent poster, but I would assume he's talking about using Indigo (3.8.x) and not Juno (4.2.x). Eclipse took a speed hit with Juno. A hit which seems to vary depending upon your system from "a bit slower" to "OMG, how can anyone use this"? On the Core i7 Windows laptop box I use for work, it fell into that "OMG, how can anyone use this?" category and I'm still using Indigo. Google "eclipse juno slow" and you'll see a ton of hits. I know they've been taking steps to address this partly by using funds Google donated to Eclipse for the purpose of having more test machines to deal with this specific issue, but I haven't had a compelling reason to see if newer releases of Juno really fix the problems for me.
ngd 14y ago
One thing I miss from Eclipse, for Java development, is the ability to run unit tests (or a whole program for that matter) while compilation errors exist in the code. Intellij forces me to make all my code compile before I can try out anything - I believe I do less iterative development and make less exploratory changes to code when using Intellij because of this. I've found I can live with it, and do, because my team uses Intellij, but I sure do miss executing code that won't compile. If you have never seen this feature of Eclipse, I encourage you to try it.
- sigzero 14y ago
  Suggest a feature enhancement with the Jetbrains folks for it.
  - quicksilver03 14y ago
    They have already implemented it in IDEA 12, if I'm reading their website correctly. Which personally I think was a waste of development time, I cannot imagine how it could be useful to keep compilation errors in your code.
    - ngd 14y ago
      I tried it out, you can now make an Eclipse like experience, albeit requiring many key presses to invoke compiliation and execution of code. It's not as slick as Eclipse, but its possible. As for the merit of the technique - try it out. I've found it allows a level of experimentation not possible without the option; personally I've found that useful when it is not obvious what the right thing to do is upfront, I can try out a small change to a chunk of code, try it out via unit tests, then update all call sites appropriately; as opposed to attempting to "upgrade" call sites appropriately using a canned refactoring before I've validated whether or not I'm going to be able to achieve what I want for a few test cases.
shortlived 14y ago
Structural search & replace That one is pretty important for me. In general, Eclipse works pretty good. And it looks incredible when compare to NetBeans and other free IDEs.
- MBCook 14y ago
  Do you know of any good guides on how to use it? I know it's there but the last time I took at look at it it looked like I was going to have to spend a bunch of time to figure it out.
  - shortlived 14y ago
    1. Everything is organized around "perspectives". A perspective is a set of views organized to help you perform a certain task. E.g. Java (coding), Debugging, CVS, etc. You can customize any perspective as you see fit. I use Java and Debugging. They took me a while to get used to, but in the end it's a very helpful construct. Don't just make one huge 'everything' perspective. Instead throw them on hot keys (alt-1, alt-2) and just switch back and forth as needed. 2. The editor and other UI widgets (proj/file trees) provide a lot of information on the state of your world via various decorations. Example - you have a Java file open. It has compilation errors. Those errors will be highlighted in the "overview" margin. This shows as colored marks on the side of the editor. They are used to quickly navigate to different things. This specific example are called Annotations in eclipse parlance. The same decorations are provided at file and project level. So, at a glance you can see if project has errors and as you drill down, it's easy to locate which dir/package has errors, etc. 2a. If you put your cursor inside of a variable, type, etc it will highlight all instances/references of said thing in the overview margin. super handy. 2b. The same goes for CVS annotation (or more general "team" annotation). Even though this is buried in my list, it might be my favorite feature. You get line by line annotations (colored by age) and you can link this margin to a history window. Click on an annotation to see full history entry in window below. Killer. 3. Useful commands: CTRL-SHIFT-G (find occurences) and CTRL-t (open type), CTRL-r (open resource), CTRL-o (open field/method) and .... i forget the key sequence but the command to open class heirarchy. Those are my main ways to navigate. Open type/resource takes wildcards. Use them. 4. All of the above allows me to work with a reduce UI, sometimes, many times in full screen mode. 5. Understand that Eclipse uses it's own compiler. If you compile outside of Eclipse (ant), then those class files are thrown out and recompiled when eclipse is run again. You can get the eclipse compiler as standard jar and it works great with Ant and the like. If you have a mixed environment, then you def need to look into that.
andrewcooke 14y ago
has the c plugin been resurrected? last time i looked, it was dead. which is a pretty major gap in an ide (i buy each release of intellij idea and use it for python, java, clojure, but i still switch to eclipse for c). nope - still dead - http://plugins.intellij.net/plugin/?id=1373 http://plugins.intellij.net/plugin/?id=1373 http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA- http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA- (also, the very latest eclipse looks really clean - i was surprised and impressed when i started it up the other day).
- nevster 14y ago
  Give AppCode a try - although it's mainly for Objective-C, it has good support for C and C++ http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/whatsnew/index.html http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/whatsnew/index.html
  - andrewcooke 14y ago
    hi - i've got the 12 ultimate edition idea and am trying to work out what plugin would contain the appcode functionality (my impression is that other intellij products are basically intellij idea plus a hard-wired plugin - pycharm is like the intellij idea python plugin, for example). but i'm having a hard time finding an objective c plugin. do you have any idea what it might be called? thanks.
    - eropple 14y ago
      I think AppCode is the exception to that tendency. I've never been able to get it to do as you'd like.
    - nevster 14y ago
      AppCode is the exception to the rule. It's a totally separate app that only runs on Mac OS X. None of it's features are available in IntelliJ. (Having said that, a lot of the base IDE remains the same so the general UI and keystrokes carry over).
ghfghg 14y ago
Because is not much better than eclipse. In fact, it is a bit worse.
- MBCook 14y ago
  Would you like to explain how? I use IntelliJ every day, and I've found it to be fantastic. When I switched about two years ago, I was happy I switched within a few days (although at this point I don't really remember why I found it to be so much better).
SCdF 14y ago
I honestly can't understand why people love IDEA so much. I know lots of people who swear by it, but absolutely none of them can articulate why. Often they say Eclipse sucks, which is completely ignoring the question, and usually doesn't come with any substantial explanation of the supposed suckage. Moreover, talking about how one thing sucks and then silently comparing it to something else implies the other thing has no flaws, which is clearly unfair and stupid. The only positive non-eclipse-hating arguments I've heard is that it's "easy to use" or "slick", both of which aren't useful to me since I'm familiar and comfortable with Eclipse's user experience. The rare time a feature is mentioned it's something Eclipse has as well. I've tried to learn it a few times but since no one has been able to articulate any good reason to use it past a kind of anti-eclipse zealotry I haven't spent more than a few hours on it. I'm not saying it's stupid to like IDEA, I'm saying that I think that preference in this case comes down to wishy washy things like 'feel', which is entirely subjective and entirely inarguable. I will say this, I've heard plenty of IDEA users be snarky and condescending to people who use Eclipse (I've recently changed jobs and now work in a place seething with them), and I've not once seen it the other way. Anicdata I know, but that is life.
- elehack 14y ago
  Ridiculous attention to detail. It isn't the big things, mostly, that draw me to IDEA (though some of them, like the way it handles projects and that Maven Just Works, help a lot), but the thousand little things that someone, somewhere, got right that you don't think about. Unless I think about it, I just notice that the overall experience is somehow more pleasant. Stuff like what comes first in autocomplete (Eclipse's quality in this regard has been somewhat inconsistent). Refactor suggesting intelligent names for variables based on their types. And then there's the theming. Normally, Swing apps are somewhat ugly and generally obnoxious. The JetBrains folks have put together a Swing LaF that's beautiful and compact, which also contributes to the overall experience just being pleasant. I'm happier using IntelliJ.
  - mtrimpe 14y ago
    ^ this For example; for some reason Flash pretty much always crashes when you're pausing the VM (stepping through commands) for too long, but it's impossible for the IDE to detect that. That meant that every time this happened you would need to first stop the debugger and start it again. In IntelliJ IDEA 12, only for Flash, the debugger's start button now turns into a 'restart' button which does just that in one click. It might be a tiny detail, but somebody actually looked at my specific use case and added an improvement for it which is quite an amazing level of attention to detail.
tieTYT 14y ago
I use IDEA and not eclipse, but for the last 2 versions of IDEA it seems to get more and more buggy and feature wise, eclipse seems exactly the same. Then of course there's the obvious reason that with the community edition there's no appserver support. Eclipse has that. At this point I'd use eclipse if I was familiar with it. I'm just too used to the key mappings of IDEA to deal with the switch over.
_casperc 14y ago
I use Eclipse simply because it allows me to have multiple projects open in the same workspace and search for files/classes across all projects. When Idea gets that feature I'll probably take another look at it.
coliveira 14y ago
I have used both IDEA and Eclipse recently. My opinion is that IDEA has very interesting tools, but when viewed as a complete platform Eclipse deliver the best experience. There are some things that IDEA does better than anyone else, but the editor itself is mediocre. For example, the UI is too complicated, and the tabs are terrible to use. The number of plugins is also much smaller than available for Eclipse. If you are happy with what IDEA delivers out of the box, then it is probably the best for you. Otherwise, I would should just stick to Eclipse because it offers better options in general.

famousactress 14y ago

A lot of people find a dark look and feel much less distracting. Now that we’ve added it, you can focus more on the code and less on the IDE. (Above screenshot: http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/darcula-1.png http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/d... ) I can't tell if we're being punk'd. I'm expected to take that screenshot as an example of a less distracting user interface for creative work? My condolences to anyone using the presumably more distracting previous version.

epidemian 14y ago
The screenshot shows a debugging session. Both the debugging panel at the bottom and the project panel at the left can be collapsed. So it's not that bad. But in general, yes, i agree in that Intellij IDEA's interface is quite overloaded. I haven't tried any language-specific version of the IDE, like PhpStorm or PyCharm; maybe those are less loaded, IDK.
- Joeri 14y ago
  Phpstorm user myself, it's as overloaded, but having used most of the competing IDE's I think Phpstorm is one of the cleanest / lightest.
chillax 14y ago
Here's a bit less cluttered one.. http://imgur.com/rhZQZ http://imgur.com/rhZQZ With the search for class/file/symbol navigation it is usually possible to live in this mode most part of the day :-)
- famousactress 14y ago
  Oh thank goodness. I'll hold off on setting up the relief fund then :)
- acavailhez 14y ago
  With the "Alt double tap and hold" keyboard shortcut, you can even remove all the side buttons

chillax 14y ago

The new compiler mode is very good. Non-intrusive and it really speeds up things, especially on a non-ssd-disk.

cgh 14y ago
Since you have obviously used the new version, can you comment on how compatible it is with projects created in v.11? Do we have to recreate the entire project, or will it import them as-is?
- Watabou 14y ago
  It imported v11 projects just fine for me.
- mmorett 14y ago
  I was able to use it at the same time I had IDEA 11 up with both using the same project. It was interesting. Every time I'd switch to the other IDE window, each one detected some changes to the project structure and wanted to reload it. Otherwise, it was very transparent. No pain at all.

flyhighplato 14y ago

I want to like IntelliJ IDEA so so much. In the same way that I want my primary computer to run Linux and all my code to be in some dialect of Lisp.

rkalla 14y ago
Same thoughts here... been trying to move exclusively over to IJ since 4.x series but two (really dumb) things send me back to Eclipse every time: Javadoc formatting and Web Project module support. I mean "really dumb" in the sense that these things shouldn't be so important to me, but as someone who writes a novel's worth of documentation inside his code, subpar Javadoc formatting doubles my workload. The project model thing is my own problem trying to mentally map the whole project/module/artifact abstraction IJ has... I don't understand it, never have, doesn't seem intuitive and mostly just frustrated me. I think more of this has to do with the layout of the project properties dialog than anything combined with my own mental reluctance to understand what they are proposing here. That said, the code quality of the product seems to be excellence. Very smooth, no surprise exceptions during use (Which is par for the course in Eclipse). Some day I'll sit down and figure it out, but until then I will continue to be confused and stick to my simple, flat, POM-defined life in Eclipse and cry every time I load up 4.2 and wonder why I am doing this to myself (if you haven't used Eclipse 4.x series yet, you don't understand how much pain there is waiting for you).
- white_devil 14y ago
  > if you haven't used Eclipse 4.x series yet, you don't understand how much pain there is waiting for you Wow. I thought Eclipse would have gotten better along the years. Back when I switched to IDEA at version 4.x, the difference between them was like night and day - IDEA was so much better. Could you tell me a bit about the pain of Eclipse? It's quite surprising if they haven't managed to produce a solid IDE yet. I agree that IDEA's way of organizing things is kind of clunky. In a way, a "project" can be thought of as "metadata about stuff I'm working on", instead of the more intuitive "a project is a directory on my hard drive". Once you set up a project, you can then bring stuff into it with "modules". For example, you may want to include source code trees and/or JARs from multiple locations.

epidemian 14y ago

I've been using the Android UI editor in IDEA 12 EAP for quite some time and it's been really pleasing to use, especially for a first release of such a complicated component. [OT] It is, however, very stupid and frustrating that an IDE has to recreate all the Android drawing and layout engine just to show a static view of what your screen will end up looking like. Compared to the experience of web development where you can edit the living DOM model and see the changes in real time because there's no difference between coding time and running time, the Android UI experience feels very arcane :(

tuananh 14y ago

AppCode EAP got dark theme too if you're an Obj-C kind-of-guy

garblegarble 14y ago

I've tried IDEA briefly a few times but what gets me is the lack of an error pane that's as compact and descriptive as the one in Eclipse - the pain of using Eclipse 4.x is tempting me to ignore that limitation, however. Does anyone know if it's possible to get this in IDEA? http://i.stack.imgur.com/1kTPd.png http://i.stack.imgur.com/1kTPd.png I know it's possible to get some of it with inspections but what I really want is something that combines errors+warnings together and gives me instant feedback. Am I just missing something that's really there?

haakon 14y ago
A million times this. Your screenshot doesn't show it, but Eclipse's error pane shows all errors and warnings from all source files in the project. This is very useful and not possible in IDEA or NetBeans. So it's easier to overlook errors and I never have the same feeling of knowing about things that need attention in my projects.
nevster 14y ago
Analayze->Inspect Code... Shows both errors and warnings

manish_gill 14y ago

I wish the Community edition would support the Python plugin. Currently, if you want to develop in Python, you can't use the Community edition. :(

Roybatty 14y ago
And if every plugin was supported in the community edition, they would be out of business.

wildranter 14y ago

Looks nice, but... Is it any faster on Mac?

yrral 14y ago
Yes! The compiler now runs in a different process from the main IDE. This actually makes a huge difference. Interacting with the editor is now instant, projects compile faster, and the IDE uses less memory. For more details: http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2012/06/brand-new-compiler-mode-in-intellij-idea-12-leda/ http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2012/06/brand-new-compiler-m...
- wildranter 14y ago
  Great! That's just what I was looking for to try again this awesome IDE. Thanks for the input!

tharshan09 14y ago

God i love the phpStorm IDE so much, I was a user of the text editors for a while. But the debugging support in this ide for PHP is just amazing. It integrates with mercurial nicely too. The recent black color scheme is just a nice surprise. Well worth the price.

martinced 14y ago

No harmt meant but I'm SCJP since more than 10 years and have been both a long time IntelliJ (still have IntelliJ version 4 installation files backups on CDs, found them yesterday) and a long time Eclipse user and I'm now using Emacs. I know, I know: Spring, refactoring, ORM + XML hell and whatnots for hundreds of K's codebase of 'enterprisey' stuff doing really not much... But as a now long-time Emacs user (since a few years) watching IntelliJ vs Eclipse fight looks a bit like like Lada vs Yugo car owners fighting about who has the best car ; )

Roybatty 14y ago
Whatever floats your boat. I bet you would be happy using notepad to write Java too. Eclipse might be Yugo, but using Emacs to write Java is like using Fred Flinstone's car. Hope you got thick callouses ;)

Cieplak 14y ago

my ideal java ide: http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/img/screen-java-dark.png http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/img/screen-java-dark.pn...

c4n4rd 14y ago
Could you share your color schema info? Thanks
- ptomato 14y ago
  http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized
deleted 14y ago
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sparx 14y ago

great ui, super fast compiling, indexing, best java ide ever

Flow 14y ago

How to make IntelliJ/WebStorm et al look less cluttered: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEwjDeof1ak&feature=youtu.be&hd=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEwjDeof1ak&feature=youtu...

manishsharan 14y ago

Could someone please comment support for Clojure ? The last time I tried , I did not find La Clojure to be any better than Eclipse + counterclockwise .