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Thank you for jumping in with this, because I completely agree that a list of advantages AND disadvantages, collected by people with both sets of preferences is more useful than a list of advantages written by the marketing manager of the product (although that is still quite useful).

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?

> You solved this yourself. ("aha, there's a weird square in the very bottom left corner...")

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.

> 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.

Right-click on folder, "Find in path..." does exactly that, doesn't it?

It's not in the right-click menu (at least on the bar at the top, and I don't know how to make the panel on the left appear), but that does it, thanks! I assumed it would be called "search" since the startup background talks about "search", didn't think to look for "find".

On OS X it's cmd + 1, I'd guess ctrl + 1 for Windows? Or click the box in the bottom left which brings up panes for everything. You can also bind the keymap however you like, to make these panes accessible in commands you can remember

Alt-1 on Windows/Mac.

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.

> There's no obvious way to search within a directory.

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.

This was 15. I didn't think to look for "find" because "search" is advertised on the default background screen and I expected it to use the same word - per the cousin comment it's working now.

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.

I use JetBrains Webstorm, and on that hitting CMD+SHFT+F creates a search local to the selected folder in the directory tree. Seems pretty intuitive to me, but finding files themselves, as opposed to string constants and the like, is actually the more difficult thing Ive yet to figure out.

Ctrl-Shift-N gets you an "open file" dialogue that does slightly fancy filtering/searching (e.g. you can put a substring of the name and it'll find it).

> 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 is a "commit and push" button. You have to hover your mouse over the Commit button in the Commit Changes window to see it.

Yeah but even if you do that it opens a dialogue for the push.

You can also disable auto save...