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Comment by jcbeard | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. I no longer use an IDE unless I have to (mostly a vim person), but if I were to choose one I'd take Netbeans. It's always been the most "put together". Easy to install, very focused, and the layout just makes sense. Despite my preference of non-JVM for execution (mainly b/c I go for performance vs. ease of coding), I like that Netbeans basically can run with almost identical look and feel on almost any platform with a functional JVM. I was always impressed that they were able to get the GUI to feel the same cross-platform, which even on Java isn't always easy to do. I hope Netbeans is able to keep its mojo intact. I was worried about the Oracle custodians...and now we might have to worry about a committee which could be just as dangerous.

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Have you ever used IntelliJ IDEA? It seems to meet all your requirements: it looks and feels identical on all platforms with a JVM, it's very focused and "put together", and the layout just makes sense. In fact I only mention this after spending the last month trying out all three (Eclipse, NetBeans, IDEA) and settling on IDEA for these reasons and a few more (especially how it indexes the whole universe and gives you smart autocompletion in every place imaginable). And the Community Edition is free, if price is a concern.

Having used both NetBeans and IntellIJ, I greatly prefer NetBeans. What drove me up the wall with IntelliJ was the poor Maven integration.

Maven projects are first-class citizens of NetBeans, which means that NetBeans can read POM files as NetBeans project files. NetBeans generates a small supplemental file (nbactions.xml) to cover the few project-related things the POM doesn't store (such as the name of the default main class or the path to the JVM), and it duplicates no information. IntelliJ, on the other hand, uses its own project format exclusively, it duplicates everything, and the IntelliJ project file regularly falls out of sync with the POM and has to be re-synced, which can be a nightmare.

At the company where we used IntelliJ, I ended up just using IntelliJ as an editor, and I did all my building by executing mvn on the command line (and we, as a company-wide thing, never ran projects in IntelliJ: we had special scripts for that). And the only reason I used IntelliJ there was because our coding standards were defined as an IntelliJ config file; if not for that, I would've just used NetBeans.

IntelliJ might be a better editor than NetBeans, and that's debatable because NetBeans is also a really good editor, but I simply cannot stand using IntelliJ for anything other than editing, while NetBeans handles non-editing tasks beautifully.

"Having used both NetBeans and IntellIJ, I greatly prefer NetBeans"

Me too, even for C++. Wish it had Dlang integration too.

IntelliJ IDEA is the undisputed leader.

One of the big differences with both NetBeans and Eclipse is that it's commercial software with nice non-paid offerings. But, for example, for my project Community Edition is not an alternative due to lack of JSP editing. NetBeans is great for editing JSP.

Other shortcomings of Community Edition are survivable. In my case this is Google App Engine support that with a lot of manual configuration can be made to run and debug in Community Edition.

Honestly, I find that IntelliJ isn't anything particularly special. Yet another tool for warezd00dz. It is fadware.

Fadware with plugins. Plugins, upon plugins, upon plugins, upon plugins.

How exactly do you define fadware? My guess is anything you decide to denigrate since there is nothing in the definition of "fad" that applies to IntelliJ, but clearly you may have some other personal esoteric definition in mind and I am curious.

I regularly use PyCharm and CLion, but I still prefer Netbeans over Eclipse and IDEA any day of the week for Java development. A big part of that is that the maven integration is nicer, and I get along well with the debugging and profiling.

Same here: I can get an IntelliJ license any day I want.

I mostly like Jetbrains, I just prefer Netbeans for the UX and Maven integration.

I mostly use NetBeans (version 6.9 because Python - and love it) or vim. I always wanted to try IntelliJ out but never got around to it, so I was fairly disappointed when I started using Android Studio for a mobile app. Granted, it is light years ahead of Eclipse, but that's a very low bar to clear... I loved the search preview (fast and clear), but everything else seems much better in NetBeans. It's also quite slow on moments, but that could be because of Google additions. Would I like PyCharm any better?

Try the Pycharm Community Edition and see for yourself. I've found it to be one of the most comfortable environments to work in.

I was truly surprised by the code inspections (the "linter") and the depth of code analysis that it does. The first community edition would get stuck on some weird constructs from time to time, but every update improves upon it and I haven't seen the 2016 edition to have any issues with the weirdest code I have to maintain.

And the Community Edition is open source. It is fun to git clone the source and build it yourself - at least fun to do it once :-)

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