Hacker News Reader

Comment by rkalla | Hacker News Reader

FWIW: IntelliJ is an excellent IDE, but all this anti-every-other-IDE commentary is silly...

Eclipse, NetBeans and IntelliJ are all fantastic; seriously, all of them.

They all have a slightly different fit and feel to them. Just figure out which one meshes with your mental model and workflow best and have at it.

The idea that one is categorically better than another is just not accurate. They are certainly better than each other at different things, but not better or worse at EVERYTHING than one another.

View on HN

The problem with Eclipse is that the UI and UX are terrible, so it really doesn't matter what else it is good at.

Unless someone actually likes Eclipse or is already very familiar with it I cannot recommend it over IntelliJ.

No argument on the Eclipse UX being bad; that being said

> "so it doesn't really matter what else it is good at"...

I think it is safe to say UX is really important to you ;)

It is. There is no room in my toolbox for sluggish and cumbersome tools.

E. I used it for 5 months before switching to IntelliJ. Code completion isn't worth using in Eclipse on large projects, it often took an entire second to show up. Partial building happens on every save, which seems like a nice idea, but on android it has to rebuild a substantial part on every deploy anyways, so it doesn't speed anything up. Often times the building would cause the UI to simply lock up. The debugger would often crash on breakpoints, windows would reset themselves and jump around, and when you modify files outside of eclipse, it would take multiple refreshes before it picked it up. Add that to no native support for color schemes (they're laggy at best with the Eclipse Color Theme plugin) and an insanely slow load time, and you wonder how this software has lasted so long. Switching to IntelliJ has not only made me significantly more productive (30% additional maybe?), but in general I feel less frustrated at work.

Back around version 8.1 I switched to Idea for several months. I got the hang of it, but always came back to Eclipse for some reason. SpringSource Tool Suite is much better than plain vanilla Eclipse, but I think I'll try out the Idea Community Edition and see how that works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com