It seems like there are lots of little things that are preferable. A few random ones off the top of my head: In my last job where we used Eclipse, we'd get a m

It seems like there are lots of little things that are preferable. A few random ones off the top of my head: In my last job where we used Eclipse, we'd get a maven project and then run mvn eclipse:eclipse to generate the eclipse project. In IntelliJ, you can just open an existing maven project by selecting the pom. Maven auto-update is also nice (if you do a mvn clean install, your project will automatically update accordingly). In eclipse, if you debugged into an external library, you'd have the option of attaching the source; then you'd have to go find the right jar to add. In intellij, you can just click "download sources" and it usually does the right thing. In general, I had a fair amount of difficulty setting up projects and getting them to run correctly under eclipse -- but that may be more of a reflection of how our projects were configured. Things seem smoother under IntelliJ.