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Comment by pdpi | Hacker News Reader

Java-the-language is a fairly crummy thing to work with, it’s Java-the-ecosystem that’s genuinely good — the JVM, the tooling, etc etc. The quality of IDEs available is definitely a very large component of that. Doing Java on a lightweight editor seems like a way to pay the price without reaping the benefits.

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I use TextMate (!) to maintain an Android SDK that's a mix of Java, C and C++ avoiding Android Studio like the plague, to maintain an iOS SDK that's mostly Objective-C, similarly avoiding Xcode's editor, and to maintain the backend written in Python that these SDK's talk to. I've got enough going on in my head w/o having to deal with the complexity of two different IDEs.

Anyway, for me Java-the-language is fine. The tooling, at least as it comes with Android (looking at you gradle and all its Android plugins) is what makes me want to pull my hair out.

I've not done any Android development but how is IntelliJ for it? While it can be slow on big codebases and obviously never as responsive as vim in a terminal, I think the tooling is excellent.

But again, you have to spend a month or so learning the shortcuts.

I haven’t used IntelliJ, only Android Studio which I know is based on IntelliJ but don’t know how much they differ. I find it to be a klunky UI and it easily eats all the CPU on a 2015 3.1 GHz MBP doing things like self-updating, downloading newer SDK versions, re-indexing a small repo, etc. I personally find it pretty unusable. There’s also parts of the UI you can’t even access (like the SDK manager and the AVD manager) unless you have a project open. It’s pretty obviously not a Mac native tool. I assume (hope anyway) it’s much better on Linux.

IntelliJ has an excellent vim keybinding plugin which I use (having come from Linux/scripting/Vim background to Java). Intellij also makes setting shortcuts pretty easy so you can customize to your needs. Having used both Eclipse and IntelliJ, I prefer the latter.

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