I have blogged in the past on a very sensitive issue – Eclipse vs IntelliJ. I come from the IntelliJ camp where I strongly feel that IntelliJ really improves developer efficiency tremendously. It might be a little opinionated, but here’s the drill: I have been working at my current job (no, its not a career, but that is content for another blog) for roughly 8 months, and I can only use Eclipse, for a multitude of reasons. So, I might be able to claim that I do use Eclipse and IntelliJ a lot.
Here’s what I found when comparing Eclipse to IntelliJ: Eclipse has way too much clutter. It does not refactor right. It is really slow in auto-completion. It just does not offer the right suggestions during auto-completion. The list goes on. It could be that I’m facing these issues because I’m using Eclipse 3.3. I really should upgrade to Eclipse 3.4 and hopefully some of these might go away.
My IDE has to be really fast, and has to be smart enough to give me the right auto-completion. My IDE has to be able to help me develop real quick. Eclipse falls short – way short. I tend to develop much faster (about 2x productivity) thanks to IntelliJ’s pretty smart auto-completion, and somehow the code comes out cleaner, as I don’t have to worry about the IDE screwing up big refactors. I end up spending less time typing, and more time refactoring.
However, the one thing that I always liked about Eclipse is that it supported various other languages and IntelliJ fell short in the category. Well, not for long – IntelliJ is catching up and now with version 8 – there’s a ton of features added with new language support. This list is just the tip of the iceberg on the new features.
Grab your evaluation copy, and try it out. Tips to using IntelliJ properly:
- Shortcuts, shortcuts, shortcuts! Learn all the keyboard shortcuts. Use the reference card (Windows + Linux, Mac) and memorise it.
- Stop touching that mouse! Every single time you move one hand from the keyboard to the mouse you have just wasted a few seconds of good coding time. Break this habit.
- Learn to type fast, without looking at your keyboard.
- Get in the habit of refactoring. There maybe once, or twice in my 3 years of using IntelliJ that it failed on my when refactoring, and I use that bloody rename shortcut like it is going out of fasion. The more often you refactor, the cleaner your code will become. It will be more maintainable as well.
- When you’re editing something that is not exactly code, like XML for instance, don’t use notepad or some old crummy text editor! Chuck it into IntelliJ and you might get a suprise that it does auto-completion for you.
Some useful sites to help you get your head around IntelliJ:
- IntelliJ product page
- IntelliJ 8 product page
- IntelliJ blog
- IntelliJ Early Access Program (EAP), with the IntelliJ 8 EAP.
- Jetbrains home page
Tags: Eclipse, IntelliJ, Java, Programming
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I agree completely. Unfortunately, my management got sold on Eclipse because it’s “free”, so they’re forcing us to convert to Eclipse. I’ve played with it many times over the years (it’s got an Ant debugger which IDEA doesn’t, so it’s good to know what it has), but I disagreed with them that this was a “good” decision.
Bad move, looks like because I refuse to agree that it was the right decision, they’re going to fire me after 10 years. Notice that it’s not that I’m refusing to switch, it’s that I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid and agreeing that it tastes good.
Doug – that’s really tough and harsh.
You being fired due to non-conformance rather than competence seems very unfair, and does make your management look really inept.
Good luck for the future – if you need to work on something on the side (might not generate revenue – infact, pretty risky), do drop a line and we can work something out. I do have a few projects on my mind at any one time.
Looks like HR requires them to go through a few more steps before they can actually fire me (turns out all those glowing evaluations do mean something).
A friend of mine suggested that this particular manger is due for management rotation soon, so if I can wait it out, he’ll probably be gone in six months or so (we play the game of musical mangers, like musical chairs, they keep rotating them around).
I actually have some open source projects I’m starting that are keeping me pretty busy when I have spare time (not much!), over in Google Code.
@Doug – good that there’s hope – and hang in there, and I really do hope that you’re next manager really starts apply the basic theory of meritocracy in his management style.
Do post your open source projects!