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Comment by michaelneale | Hacker News Reader

IDEA (IntelliJ IDE) is a diamond - but not visually. In terms of editing (and this applies to scala, ruby, javascript as well as java) the experience is amazing - it really understands what you are doing.

But it is the ugliest thing... just horrible, but if you can get past that, it is a great tool.

OS-X users are a big paying contingent for Jetbrains - so I expect they will find a way, one way or another, to make it run well.

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Huh? I don't get this at all. IntelliJ is a phenomenally great IDE. I'm sure that is blinding me to the ugliness you're seeing. But thinking about just the visual elements, I still don't see your point. What exactly is the problem?

Now Eclipse -- that's ugly, inside and out.

Font rendering is horrible (at least on linux), you have to try various l&f before finding one that is "acceptable", etc.

It's a great IDE, general usability is certainly better than Eclipse (it was meant to be an IDE as opposed to Eclipse which is a platform with an IDE built on top), but personally, font rendering was a deal break.

Thankfully that bit is fine on a mac. And really - that is 90% of it there - the rest is a distraction.

Their icons are, well, tasteless is the best way to describe them.

I know people don't often talk about usability and developer tools - but it really really matters. You spend a LOT of time on it - may as well fuss over it and make it right. IDEA gets so much right.... and this is also a good example of when user experience can be great, but design (graphic) not so great.

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