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Comment by acomjean | Hacker News Reader

I use both. Jetbrains is better, but it costs money. Its worth it to save the time figuring out eclipse. I use eclipse because I'm maintaining some tomcat code, and the code live in an eclipse project world. Eclipse works and once set up it does it job well. The truth is its just too complex. I still can't get it to work with Git. Eclipse is free (since I use it professionally I donated.)

one example in Jetbrains I can rightclick a file or folder in the navigator and search there or inside there. Eclipse(oxygen) there is a search menu with 12 items. Most of those pull up a dialog box with 7 tabs, most of which have some sort of search option which I hope have sane defaults. Sure its more powerful, but its way more than I need 99% of the time.

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" Its worth it to save the time figuring out eclipse."

We talking about people making 100k+ but are worried about spending a few hundred for a better tool. It just shows that the same amount of money is valued different in a different context. Spending 500 more for a better laptop is being questioned and two days later you got to dinner with some VPs and they blow more than $200 per person for wine and food.

I don't know specifically about InteliJ, but the product price is usually the lowest cost of a closed source solution. I work in a government owned company. We have strict procurement rules that we must obey to buy things. Beyond the procurement bureaucracy, now we have to manage how much licenses we have. The install of a new instance in a user machine must be tracked. A user can't by himself install the software, we must have specialized persons to do it. To setup test and/or disposable environments is a hell. If we reach the maximum of licenses, a high payed employee must spend time searching for who is not using the software to uninstall, and surely the person won't be available.

The price is probably the lowest cost of a closed source solution.

We had a similar experience with a closed source profiler. We paid for it, and the vendor repeatedly sent armies of sales engineers and even a core developer to help us use it.

Because of licensing enforcement mechanisms (we had a site license, FFS), we couldn’t figure out how to push it as part of the product to test or production clusters, so we just use perf, even though it has maybe 1% the functionality, is frequently wrong, and we desperately need the 99% missing functionality.

You definitely have to be careful. Some vendors are awful. Jetbrains is pretty easy though. Pay your subscription and you are ready to go.

JetBrains does a pretty good job making this a bit less painful. They have a license server you install that dishes out floating licenses to IDEs. Floating licenses are released after 2-3 days, so if someone isn't using the product it doesn't consume a license.

It all depends what of developer you are. If you work as a contractor it makes sense, but people working as employees have no incentive to buy more hardware and/or software.

I read this the opposite way: it's worth it (buying intellij) to save (the enormous amount of) time (you would spend) figuring out eclipse.

Not everyone lives in US and earns 100k+… However, even you you get 1/3 of that, if having a better tools speeds you up it's still worth it IMHO (thus I took the plunge and migrated from NetBeans to IntelliJ a couple of years back).

ad rem - I could never make myself using Eclipse - it always felt like getting in the way instead of helping.

I do think that the price as a cons being like 15$/month is kind of a negligible cost if you're using it every day for multiple hours.

If you save around 15 minutes per month the cost is already amortized.

It is not just the price - which might be OK for someone who uses it for several hours per day in a paid job but less palatable for those who don't get paid for their work or who only occasionally need it - but the mere fact that you need to get a license to use it instead of just downloading the thing and firing it up. It is one more step to take, one more thing to go wrong, one more dependency over free software. Given the prevalence of licensing conflicts and the stiff penalties demanded by copyright holders over such issues I tend to go out of my way to avoid exposure to such issues and use free software whenever feasible.

I agree that the search in folder is lacking, having to select the folder before to use "search in selected ressources" is annoying. Personnaly, I just remove all the menu item other than file search.

Usually, I use the text search, with a file filter for the various sources files of the application: that way I can find the same variable/method/class across the java, jsp and configuration files.

JetBrains is great. I happily paid for that over Eclipse.

The free version of IntelliJ does more or less what many people want.

Jetbrains costs money, but it's a rounding error for a professional developer. The full Jetbrains toolbox costs less than a dollar a day. My office spends more money on coffee for the breakroom than we do on Jetbrains licensing for our developers.

The problem is not making the payment, is to convince the company that everybody (or even some people) need that license. In some companies this is a lot of trouble.

It's saved me enough time, energy and tears to justify buying my own license ten times over.

My sympathies for anyone in a company so gimped that they don't allow developers to install software on their own development machines without forms signed off by seventeen people, a sacrifice to the IT administrators, and a 21 day waiting period.

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