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Comment by carson | Hacker News Reader

I also wonder what "fantastic IDE" he is referring to. I constantly hear people talk about visual studio being great but I don't believe they have ever stepped outside their world to try some of the Java IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA.

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I also wondered the same thing. Visual Studio is so bad, you have to actually buy another piece of software (http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/) for it to start approaching "good", but it's still not close to "fantastic".

Which IDE do you think is better?

Eh, it's not subpar either. I purposely didn't get Resharper because I hate how intrusive it is. TestDriven.NET and ViEmu make VS2008 a passable IDE IMO.

Recent versions of IDEA (7+) with recent versions of JDK (6+) support subpixel antialiasing.

Well, I haven't tried the most recent ones, and definitely not IntelliJ IDEA, but at the time I tried them, both Eclipse and NetBeans were substantially worse (slower, worse intellisense, debug options, etc...) than Visual Studio.

Visual Studio works fantastically for my line of work as an IDE. If I were doing some other line of work it would probably be unsuitable, but for Big Corp (tm) programming it is pretty good, much better than the Java equivalents.

The number one thing that turned me off about IntelliJ IDEA was the horrible font rendering. I am not going to suffer the lack of cleartype for eight hours a day, thanks. The rendering made IntelliJ positively unusable. I really don't care about the awesome refactoring support and all that jazz if I can't read my source code comfortably.

What platform did you use IntelliJ IDEA on? I work with about 100 other (highly opinionated) developers that all use it, and I've never once heard someone complain about the font rendering.

Windows.

Huh. I've used IntelliJ on Windows for close to 8 years and never noticed any font rendering issues.

Well, looks like I have egg on my face. Your comment prompted me to download the latest version of IntelliJ and try it out, and the rendering has improved tremendously. It is now indistinguishable from ClearType (it probably is ClearType). :)

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