As a newbie computer science major who "grew up" in the era of Eclipse/IntelliJ conversion, IntelliJ will never cease to amaze me in how much more productive I became with IDE tools and the general "power behind the compiler".
Mad props to the plugin interface JetBrains has provided and the novel solutions that have come out of this style of thinking that far outpaces the experience in something like Xcode.
For Rust I'm now using CLion and that's been wonderful as well. Kudos to the plug-in authors.
However I think its editor is subpar and not very customizable. I also dislike its simple vim mode.
I really wish I could pay for IntelliJ's backend with my desired editor. It's a shame IntelliJ didn't embrace LSP and work with the standard. I think eventually this will come to hurt them, because it just motivates those who want a better editor to build their own LSP backends.
I have already dropped IntelliJ for almost every language because the LSP servers have gotten so good. The only languages I'm unable to avoid are the big JVM languages (except for Clojure). But one day someone is going to build a great JVM LSP and then I'll drop my IntelliJ subscription once and for all.
I've been hoping that the scala guys tackle this issue soon:
https://github.com/scalameta/metals-feature-requests/issues/...
> I was known for my annoying habit of stating how Smalltalk's IDE was better than anything I'd seen. No longer. For me IntelliJ was first leap forwards in IDEs since Smalltalk.
2 - No continuous indexing of source code, stuff is just there.
3 - During execution of REPL statements or debug sessions, an errors jump into the debugger, fix the issue and continue as if nothing had happened
4 - a REPL that integrates the code being written, with inline images and graphical representation of data structures
5 - The complete developer experience is available to the developer and can be customised at any time without rebooting it.
6 - Code components can be integrated into other documents as live objects (this is where OLE and Taligent got their ideas from)
I do think that the REPL workflow is way underappreciated and missing in Intellij. What I like about it is that it still focuses on working on semantic intent rather than editing text. In this way, it's similar in some sense to the idea of working on S-expressions rather than text.
After all I was asked for 5 and wrote 6, could keeping writing a few more.