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Comment by hugi | Hacker News Reader

I have the exact opposite experience. I've attempted to switch to IntelliJ on multiple occasions in the past couple of years but I've never gotten it to feel as fast and flexible as Eclipse. Is it possible you're comparing to old versions; Eclipse used to be really slow 4-5 years ago, but the current versions running on an SSD are blazing fast.

If there's one thing I hate about Eclipse, it's that it's kind of ugly :).

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So it's totally possible, my Eclipse journey ended about 3 years ago and I've never looked back.

Also for the past 2 years I haven't been coding much java, mainly python django / javascript. And I will say the tooling for django debugging in PyCharm is really excellent, both in setting it up and daily use. The Eclipse plugin might work but really PyCharm is the meth of debugging setups: It'd be hard to leave.

Whenever I try to switch IntelliJ I hit a few roadblocks that force me to turn back to eclipse, sadly.

* No true multiproject/workspace support (with maven integration)

* Slower compile times than in Eclipse, somehow

* Have to hit an extra shortcut after editing a file for a hot reload to happen while debugging

Am I just crazy, or are these really areas that IntelliJ is weaker in than Eclipse?

I had only one showstopper which prevented me from switching to IntelliJ:

* Whenever I Alt-Tab to some other application, and then Alt-Tab back to IntelliJ, it somehow selects Menu, and I need to actually get off hands from my keyboard, click on the editor frame, and only after all of that hassle I could continue typing. Happened on multiple machines using multiple operating systems.

If I'm not mistaken, ESC sets the focus back to the editor. But yes, I agree, pretty annoying.

What do you mean by "true multiproject/workspace support?" You can add other maven projects as modules into your IntelliJ project using the "Add Maven Projects" icon in the Maven Projects tool window. And you can also open multiple IntelliJ projects at once in different windows.

That's not true support. I have IntelliJ AND pycharm. In pycharm I have all my python and Javascript projects open in the left. I never close a project. I open them all at once.

Java projects on the other hand have to be in separate windows and its annoying. I don't even program in python anymore but I keep renewing pycharm just for the Javascript project convenience that beats intelliJ

I want to be able to have 10-20 projects open and be able to view their sources without switching between windows. The project files should also not depend on each other, but if one of its maven dependency is another opened project it should use that during maven dependency resolution.

You can do this just fine with IntelliJ! IMHO, IntelliJ support for multi-project with maven is better. There are no duplicate resource or type when looking for something. There is a correct hierarchy view in the sidebar.

Could you explain how? Whenever I open another project it seems to become it'd own window. I must be missing something.

Like I said, open the Maven Projects tool window and click the green plus icon ("Add Maven Projects").

I think I got it to work, somewhat. It seems I need some kind of "master" project to add all of the other projects to, which seems kind of clumsy. I suppose it works, though.

Sorry for the late response. Like bryan said though, this is pretty straightforward. I hope you can make it!

I switched from Eclipse to IntelliJ about a year ago, on a machine with an SSD, and found IntelliJ to be way faster and to have more useful features. I'm not sure what accounts for the difference.

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