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Comment by asdkhadsj | Hacker News Reader

> Amongst the current crop of engineers, there seems to be a stigma against even trying Eclipse or IntelliJ. I kind of feel like junior engineers are missing out on discovering some much more powerful tooling and forming their own opinions.

For me it's the text editing features that these IDEs lack. I'm definitely giving up advanced language integration, but I (and many) make the choice to do this for more powerful and/or preferred text capabilities.

Vim, Emacs, Kakoune being my main examples. Not just a "vim mode" - I've never used one of those that was even remotely useful for me, heh.

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The jetbrains editors are amazing, if you learn the keystrokes. I see few bother to explore/learn them though... I haven't found an editor that matches the features.

My main prob with jetbrains is project setup sucks, and the support for quick editing an arbitrary file is awkward. so for quick editing of a file I end up in atom or vim. I'm currently trying to get vs code's editor to be as similar as possible to intellij as possible. it looks like code's editor is pretty solid and full featured.

What are some text-editing features that you find IntelliJ lacking?

It's more about the style of editing. Ie, right now I massively prefer Kakoune style editing. I choose that over Vim, despite Vim having much wider support.

When compared to Vim, it's not about one specific "feature" that vim lacks, it's Vim, it has just about everything - it's about my editing UX, and vastly preferring how Kakoune does it.

Now would I choose IntelliJ if it could perfectly replicate how Kakoune does editing? Without a doubt I'd choose IntelliJ. Yet I massively doubt that's even possible.

Fwiw, I've been dying to use a GUI editor, but I cannot give up first class implementation of my text editing methodology of choice, be it vim, Kakoune, etc. It's not about "is it possible to do X", it's possible to do nearly everything in Notepad.

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