10 ms·

IntelliJ IDEA 14.1

71 points by idoco 12y ago

_ZeD_ 12y ago
I always fail to understood why these products are so ugly to see...
- unfamiliar 12y ago
  Probably because they are written in Java. I don't think I've ever seen a good looking Java application.
  - agildehaus 12y ago
    Any decent Android app?
- chillax 12y ago
  If you are refering to the look and feel it's probably down to what's possible with Javas UI frameworks (Swing/AWT).
- LoneWolf 12y ago
  I fail to see why you call it ugly, the most important thing is not if it is beautiful or ugly but if works well, and helps development.
- Vespasian 12y ago
  Maybe it's just me but i quite like the dark version (Theme "Darcular"). Nothing wrong with it.
  - LoneWolf 12y ago
    Sorry for being pedantic, but the theme is called "Darcula".
- gecko 12y ago
  I disagree they're straight-up ugly, but they're certainly cluttered, and I think there's a very simple reason for that: IntelliJ (or VisualStudio, or Xcode, or anything in this class) is an expert tool. Expert tools can be insanely complex to use, and can have very steep learning curves, because the people who use them are willing and able to invest the time. In exchange, the tools assume that most users are going to want to customize the living daylights out of their tooling. This means that really good IDEs like IntelliJ, Visual Studio, etc., can optimize for two separate extremes. On the one hand, it almost doesn't matter how cluttered they are, because experts are going to customize them to look exactly how they want anyway. On the other hand, they pack so much functionality that they face a very real problem of people not even knowing what's there in the first place. (E.g., did you know you can debug any browser's JavaScript directly from IntelliJ? I sure didn't until surprisingly recently, but apparently that's been there for quite some time.) So there's also a mode that displays all the things that the IDE can possibly do, and you're completely correct that that mode looks borderline unusable. Honestly, as long as the clutter is done sanely, I'm okay with it. I frequently toggle between just-the-code and all-the-things when I'm in IntelliJ, and the recent No Distraction mode makes doing that a lot simpler. If I know a keyboard shortcut, awesome. If I don't, I have the shortcuts for all the panes hardwired, so at least I can quickly browse the 25 buttons that show up, immediately discard the 15 I recognize, and quickly find which of the remaining 10 actually does what I want. I'm not going to argue this is the most elegant or most efficient, but I'm not convinced it's a horrible trade-off, either.
  - LoneWolf 12y ago
    So there's also a mode that displays all the things that the IDE can possibly do I'm curious, how do I turn that mode on?
    - gecko 12y ago
      In IntelliJ, that'd be turning on the Toolbar, the Tool Buttons, Navigation Bar, and Status Bar, and then opening all the panels at once. In real life, I don't actually turn all those things on; I instead have common panels enabled, and then bound a shortcut to Distraction Free Mode that I use when I'm actually coding instead of debugging/building/etc. I don't remember the equivalent for Visual Studio off the top of my head, but it's similar. Emacs and Vim don't really have a mode like that. I suppose the closest in Emacs would be just hitting M-x and then tabbing through all the functions, but I'm not sure that counts.
- sz4kerto 12y ago
  It might look much worse than Sublime Text on your Macbook when you're sitting in a coffee shop sipping your vanilla frappucino. However, apart from VS it's _the_ IDE to get things done when working with large and complex codebase. (I'm talking about multi-million LOCs, where a method rename takes 1 second in IntelliJ, and you can be pretty sure that it has properly checked out the files, put the changes into the proper VCS changeset, updated the comments accordingly, etc.)
  - contergan 12y ago
    I would agree, if IntelliJ's performance wasn't so bad. On my 2012 MBA I had to turn off the auto completion, because otherwise, just typing text into the editor would make the fans run on full speed and lead to stuttering and hang-ups. So, unfortunately for performance reasons, I had to switch back to Sublime Text.
    - vetinari 12y ago
      The target audience for MBA is not workstation/professional users, for that it was underpowered when it launchaed (current Macbook is the same). That's fine, because the normal or mainstream user does not need that much power to browse facebook and ebay. On my 2012 Thinkpad T-series (8 GB RAM, SSD, shitty display) Idea runs very nicely (Java, Python). But then, we cannot compare Thinkpad and MBA, as they are entirely different weight categories.
      - baldfat 12y ago
        To be fair, I use auto complete with my 5 year old netbook in VIM and Kate with auto complete and it doesn't slow down. I also run RStudio (occasionally) and it has a slight slow down. Intellij slows only a little more and is usable with my old netbook.
    - jgrowl 12y ago
      I am probably working with smaller code-bases than you, but I've never had this problem with auto-completion causing intellij to hang on my mba. I'm pretty sure it is a 2011 model too. shrug
- winterbe 12y ago
  I couldn't disagree more. In my opinion it's the most decent looking IDE / code editor I've ever used. Most IDEs are cluttered with a gazillion views. Intellij focuses on the code editor instead. You can hide everything but the code editor and keep full control via keyboard shortcuts.
- cfontes 12y ago
  Comming from eclipse, intelliJ is beautiful! and also faster. In fact if you develop in Java and you are not using it... you are missing it. It's awesome.
nothrabannosir 12y ago
I'm using IntelliJ on Windows for Scala dev, and boy is it slow. I have to manually set the process priority to "Below Normal" every time, or it will soak up all system resources and music playback becomes jittery. Clicking right on anything is a four-second pause mistake. It's free, so I shouldn't be complaining. Thanks for the product! Really, it's better than vim (especially with the intellij vim-mode plugin). I appreciate it. But I'd feel a bit sour had I paid money for this. Especially after having seen Visual Studio. Wow, what a difference. EDIT: laptop specs fwiw: Lenovo G505s, AMD A10, 8GB RAM, normal HDD. EDIT2: Comparing the UI to other java apps is disingenuous. I'm no UI expert, but this looks fine. It won't win any awards, but it's not your average pile of swig.
- sz4kerto 12y ago
  It depends on the language you're using (working with Scala is usually slow). Also, make sure that IntelliJ caches are on an SSD. VS is very quick, but for example parsing C# is very easy compared to Scala (partly because C# was designed for that from day zero). Maven also slows down things a bit (IntelliJ can search in classes that are not even referenced by the project.)
  - nothrabannosir 12y ago
    Good points. I have no SSD, unfortunately. There are two types of slow: there is slow to react, and slow to respond. I can understand that IntelliJ is having a hard time recompiling the Scala source. As you said, Scala is difficult to parse and compile. What I don't like is the context menu taking several seconds to even appear, locking up the entire UI (!), when I right click. Or music playback going haywire just because I am switching files or refactoring. Setting it to "low priority" solves that last issue, but that doesn't make me feel better about IntelliJ. If an app is slow, fine. But deal with it. React quickly, respond later. PS: I say that now, but once I have a better computer, it's all "IntelliJ is great." I only feel this way because my computer can't take it.
    - tormeh 12y ago
      I've heard that the correct way to parse a Scala program is dependent on the types in it. I think maybe that's why IDEs are so wrong about where your errors are unless you terminate each statement with ";"
duiker101 12y ago
I'll go against the flow of people not happy about IntelliJ. My experience with it started with Android Studio which I found WAY better than eclipse. I like the UI better, I find it faster, easier and more configurable. Since then I started using IntelliJ products for everything, there are flavour for any environment you need, from Python to ruby or whatever. I can keep my settings in any context and there are tool for many frameworks and integrations like django or App Engine. I don't find it particularly slow. It's not blazing fast, but I would say it's in the norm. For the price I think it's a great asset to have.
- mark_l_watson 12y ago
  I totally agree. I have purchased licenses for IntelliJ, RubyMine, and PyCharm for years. That said, 90% of the time I spend using Jetbrains projects is now simply using IntelliJ to edit Clojure and Clojurescript files. I run repls externally, and setup shortcuts for use with :reload or :reload-all. As a Clojure editor I like the fast code navigation, autocomplete, and visual warnings of syntax errors.
  - konradb 12y ago
    Do you use Cursive? Last time I tried it I found some weird bugs in the text editing which caused problems for me. I very much wanted it to work though, I need to try it again.
    - mark_l_watson 12y ago
      I install and use Cursive, occasionally, but I am waiting for it to ship as a product. Then I will probably buy it. The author has sent me a few emails, and seems dedicated to the project.
muraiki 12y ago
I'd love to use IntelliJ, but no matter what obscure hacks I try, I simply cannot get it to render fonts properly under Ubuntu 14.10. This makes me sad, because it seems awesome for Scala.
- kasabali 12y ago
  I have very good news for you. 1. Download this patched jdk from https://code.google.com/p/tuxjdk/ https://code.google.com/p/tuxjdk/ 2. Extract it somewhere 3. Make it your JAVA_HOME before launching IntelliJ. 4. Profit!
korayal 12y ago
Finally some high-dpi support after a lot of ( https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-114944 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-114944 , https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-124304 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-124304 , https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-117729 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-117729 ) complaints for about a year and a half.

IntelliJ IDEA 14.1

71 points by idoco 12y ago

_ZeD_ 12y ago

I always fail to understood why these products are so ugly to see...

unfamiliar 12y ago
Probably because they are written in Java. I don't think I've ever seen a good looking Java application.
- agildehaus 12y ago
  Any decent Android app?
chillax 12y ago
If you are refering to the look and feel it's probably down to what's possible with Javas UI frameworks (Swing/AWT).
LoneWolf 12y ago
I fail to see why you call it ugly, the most important thing is not if it is beautiful or ugly but if works well, and helps development.
Vespasian 12y ago
Maybe it's just me but i quite like the dark version (Theme "Darcular"). Nothing wrong with it.
- LoneWolf 12y ago
  Sorry for being pedantic, but the theme is called "Darcula".
gecko 12y ago
I disagree they're straight-up ugly, but they're certainly cluttered, and I think there's a very simple reason for that: IntelliJ (or VisualStudio, or Xcode, or anything in this class) is an expert tool. Expert tools can be insanely complex to use, and can have very steep learning curves, because the people who use them are willing and able to invest the time. In exchange, the tools assume that most users are going to want to customize the living daylights out of their tooling. This means that really good IDEs like IntelliJ, Visual Studio, etc., can optimize for two separate extremes. On the one hand, it almost doesn't matter how cluttered they are, because experts are going to customize them to look exactly how they want anyway. On the other hand, they pack so much functionality that they face a very real problem of people not even knowing what's there in the first place. (E.g., did you know you can debug any browser's JavaScript directly from IntelliJ? I sure didn't until surprisingly recently, but apparently that's been there for quite some time.) So there's also a mode that displays all the things that the IDE can possibly do, and you're completely correct that that mode looks borderline unusable. Honestly, as long as the clutter is done sanely, I'm okay with it. I frequently toggle between just-the-code and all-the-things when I'm in IntelliJ, and the recent No Distraction mode makes doing that a lot simpler. If I know a keyboard shortcut, awesome. If I don't, I have the shortcuts for all the panes hardwired, so at least I can quickly browse the 25 buttons that show up, immediately discard the 15 I recognize, and quickly find which of the remaining 10 actually does what I want. I'm not going to argue this is the most elegant or most efficient, but I'm not convinced it's a horrible trade-off, either.
- LoneWolf 12y ago
  So there's also a mode that displays all the things that the IDE can possibly do I'm curious, how do I turn that mode on?
  - gecko 12y ago
    In IntelliJ, that'd be turning on the Toolbar, the Tool Buttons, Navigation Bar, and Status Bar, and then opening all the panels at once. In real life, I don't actually turn all those things on; I instead have common panels enabled, and then bound a shortcut to Distraction Free Mode that I use when I'm actually coding instead of debugging/building/etc. I don't remember the equivalent for Visual Studio off the top of my head, but it's similar. Emacs and Vim don't really have a mode like that. I suppose the closest in Emacs would be just hitting M-x and then tabbing through all the functions, but I'm not sure that counts.
sz4kerto 12y ago
It might look much worse than Sublime Text on your Macbook when you're sitting in a coffee shop sipping your vanilla frappucino. However, apart from VS it's _the_ IDE to get things done when working with large and complex codebase. (I'm talking about multi-million LOCs, where a method rename takes 1 second in IntelliJ, and you can be pretty sure that it has properly checked out the files, put the changes into the proper VCS changeset, updated the comments accordingly, etc.)
- contergan 12y ago
  I would agree, if IntelliJ's performance wasn't so bad. On my 2012 MBA I had to turn off the auto completion, because otherwise, just typing text into the editor would make the fans run on full speed and lead to stuttering and hang-ups. So, unfortunately for performance reasons, I had to switch back to Sublime Text.
  - vetinari 12y ago
    The target audience for MBA is not workstation/professional users, for that it was underpowered when it launchaed (current Macbook is the same). That's fine, because the normal or mainstream user does not need that much power to browse facebook and ebay. On my 2012 Thinkpad T-series (8 GB RAM, SSD, shitty display) Idea runs very nicely (Java, Python). But then, we cannot compare Thinkpad and MBA, as they are entirely different weight categories.
    - baldfat 12y ago
      To be fair, I use auto complete with my 5 year old netbook in VIM and Kate with auto complete and it doesn't slow down. I also run RStudio (occasionally) and it has a slight slow down. Intellij slows only a little more and is usable with my old netbook.
  - jgrowl 12y ago
    I am probably working with smaller code-bases than you, but I've never had this problem with auto-completion causing intellij to hang on my mba. I'm pretty sure it is a 2011 model too. shrug
winterbe 12y ago
I couldn't disagree more. In my opinion it's the most decent looking IDE / code editor I've ever used. Most IDEs are cluttered with a gazillion views. Intellij focuses on the code editor instead. You can hide everything but the code editor and keep full control via keyboard shortcuts.
cfontes 12y ago
Comming from eclipse, intelliJ is beautiful! and also faster. In fact if you develop in Java and you are not using it... you are missing it. It's awesome.

nothrabannosir 12y ago

I'm using IntelliJ on Windows for Scala dev, and boy is it slow. I have to manually set the process priority to "Below Normal" every time, or it will soak up all system resources and music playback becomes jittery. Clicking right on anything is a four-second pause mistake. It's free, so I shouldn't be complaining. Thanks for the product! Really, it's better than vim (especially with the intellij vim-mode plugin). I appreciate it. But I'd feel a bit sour had I paid money for this. Especially after having seen Visual Studio. Wow, what a difference. EDIT: laptop specs fwiw: Lenovo G505s, AMD A10, 8GB RAM, normal HDD. EDIT2: Comparing the UI to other java apps is disingenuous. I'm no UI expert, but this looks fine. It won't win any awards, but it's not your average pile of swig.

sz4kerto 12y ago
It depends on the language you're using (working with Scala is usually slow). Also, make sure that IntelliJ caches are on an SSD. VS is very quick, but for example parsing C# is very easy compared to Scala (partly because C# was designed for that from day zero). Maven also slows down things a bit (IntelliJ can search in classes that are not even referenced by the project.)
- nothrabannosir 12y ago
  Good points. I have no SSD, unfortunately. There are two types of slow: there is slow to react, and slow to respond. I can understand that IntelliJ is having a hard time recompiling the Scala source. As you said, Scala is difficult to parse and compile. What I don't like is the context menu taking several seconds to even appear, locking up the entire UI (!), when I right click. Or music playback going haywire just because I am switching files or refactoring. Setting it to "low priority" solves that last issue, but that doesn't make me feel better about IntelliJ. If an app is slow, fine. But deal with it. React quickly, respond later. PS: I say that now, but once I have a better computer, it's all "IntelliJ is great." I only feel this way because my computer can't take it.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    I've heard that the correct way to parse a Scala program is dependent on the types in it. I think maybe that's why IDEs are so wrong about where your errors are unless you terminate each statement with ";"

duiker101 12y ago

I'll go against the flow of people not happy about IntelliJ. My experience with it started with Android Studio which I found WAY better than eclipse. I like the UI better, I find it faster, easier and more configurable. Since then I started using IntelliJ products for everything, there are flavour for any environment you need, from Python to ruby or whatever. I can keep my settings in any context and there are tool for many frameworks and integrations like django or App Engine. I don't find it particularly slow. It's not blazing fast, but I would say it's in the norm. For the price I think it's a great asset to have.

mark_l_watson 12y ago
I totally agree. I have purchased licenses for IntelliJ, RubyMine, and PyCharm for years. That said, 90% of the time I spend using Jetbrains projects is now simply using IntelliJ to edit Clojure and Clojurescript files. I run repls externally, and setup shortcuts for use with :reload or :reload-all. As a Clojure editor I like the fast code navigation, autocomplete, and visual warnings of syntax errors.
- konradb 12y ago
  Do you use Cursive? Last time I tried it I found some weird bugs in the text editing which caused problems for me. I very much wanted it to work though, I need to try it again.
  - mark_l_watson 12y ago
    I install and use Cursive, occasionally, but I am waiting for it to ship as a product. Then I will probably buy it. The author has sent me a few emails, and seems dedicated to the project.

muraiki 12y ago

I'd love to use IntelliJ, but no matter what obscure hacks I try, I simply cannot get it to render fonts properly under Ubuntu 14.10. This makes me sad, because it seems awesome for Scala.

kasabali 12y ago
I have very good news for you. 1. Download this patched jdk from https://code.google.com/p/tuxjdk/ https://code.google.com/p/tuxjdk/ 2. Extract it somewhere 3. Make it your JAVA_HOME before launching IntelliJ. 4. Profit!

korayal 12y ago

Finally some high-dpi support after a lot of ( https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-114944 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-114944 , https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-124304 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-124304 , https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-117729 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-117729 ) complaints for about a year and a half.