With all respect, I don't I understand your point. FTR, I'm also a developer in past and in present. If you have an argument in regard to actual points shared in my article, please share it with others.
The git "commit and push" workflow is less ergonomic than eclipse's - you have to wait for it to perform the commit and then ok another dialogue to do the push, rather than just hitting "commit and push" and letting it happen in the background.
There's no obvious way to search within a directory. I don't want to search everywhere which is the only option I see in ctrl-A. I want to be able to right click or similar on a directory in my project and search just in that directory.
I can't tell how to reorganize the UI. In Eclipse I have the Window > Views menu. In IntelliJ panels seem to appear and disappear arbitrarily as I invoke particular actions and I have no idea what rules it follows or how to control it. Edit: aha, there's a weird square in the very bottom left corner: having clicked that the tabs for the panels have appeared which makes it much easier.
No save button means I can't tell the IDE when not to try to compile. This is important when working on complex code (particularly Scala) and I know compiling it is going to take a few seconds of sluggishness.
The Scala presentation compiler (admittedly not really the subject of this article) has too many spurious errors (most prominently one I reported as SCL-9700).
Most importantly of all, continuous building simply isn't reliable enough. In eclipse, if I've hit save I can tell when the build has finished, and if the build has finished and there are no problems in the problems view then I am 100% confident that my code actually compiles. This simply isn't the case in IntelliJ (e.g. after renaming a class it won't necessarily complete the rebuild and so errors don't always show up until after you deliberately make).
That being said, as someone who uses IntelliJ frequently, I wanted to respond to a couple of your points:
> No obvious way to search within a directory
In the "project" pane (the place where it shows the folder structure of your files) just right-click on any folder and select "Find in Path" (Ctrl-Shift-F). Definitely an important feature, I use this all the time.
> I can't tell how to reorganize the UI.
You solved this yourself. ("aha, there's a weird square in the very bottom left corner...")
> No save button means I can't tell the IDE when not to try to compile [...] compiling it is going to take a few seconds of sluggishness
Interesting. My experience has been that the compiling just takes up background, low priority threads and doesn't interfere with my work -- I don't even notice it getting behind. I have never tried it with Scala code (which does a LOT more during the compile phase) so maybe it's more noticeable when doing that.
> continuous building simply isn't reliable enough [...] (e.g. after renaming a class it won't necessarily complete the rebuild...)
Curious. I never seem to encounter problems like this. I wonder why. Does the ability to trigger a make when you want it mitigate this somewhat?
Indeed. I think this whole thread is showing that the UI has a lot of surprising/nondiscoverable aspects though. It would be better if all the functionality was accessible via the main menus as a fallback.
> Does the ability to trigger a make when you want it mitigate this somewhat?
Ironically it would probably be better to get myself into the right habit if the continuous building were less reliable - it goes wrong rarely enough that I feel dumb insisting on a make every time, but if I start trusting it I get tripped up.
The key combination for make is relatively fiddly. Maybe I should try binding it to ctrl-S.
Right-click on folder, "Find in path..." does exactly that, doesn't it?
I switch between Mac (work) and Linux (home) and trying to remember which Linux shortcuts move onto Cmd is turning out to be a struggle.
On OSX at least: CMD+SHIFT+F brings up the Find dialog. Scope defaults to Whole Project (ALT+H) but you can change it to Directory (ALT+O) which seems to default to the directory of the currently selected file. (Or maybe Scope actually defaults to the last one you used.)
I'm wondering what version of IDEA you tried that wasn't this way?
I don't run into compiler issues too often, but I also don't use shapeless or scalaz so I wouldn't be surprised if more complex type signatures give IDEA trouble. I have noticed a drastic improvement with the Scala support since IDEA 13 or so.
Sadly the Scala support is still quite unreliable at least at the presentation level - lots of spurious red in the editor - maybe better than it was. I use both shapeless and scalaz extensively.
There is a "commit and push" button. You have to hover your mouse over the Commit button in the Commit Changes window to see it.
It's just a fact, not a slight.
(And I say this as someone that happens to love just about everything this company puts out!)
Edit: and not that I'm telling the jetbrains folks how to do their job, but a marketing manager who has communication difficulties in a given language generally isn't given the responsibility to make public company statements in that language.
Basically your objections aren't holding much water.
And my interpretation makes perfect sense, especially if you consider the individual in question might not be a native English speaker. Seriously, I think people complaining about this are reading far too much into this. Chill.
Did you check the articles' URL? It's blog.jetbrains.com (i.e. an official JetBrains blog). A disclosure would be redundant.
What really really turned me off was when I found and reported a really annoying bug only to be told to buy the not yet released(IIRC) upgrade.