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Comment by steipete | Hacker News Reader

NetBeans is still around? If you don't want to use Eclipse, try IntelliJ.

Netbeans is less compelling now that we have IntelliJ CE but given a choice between Eclipse and Netbeans, I would choose Netbeans every time!

Eclipse has always seemed to me to be baroque and over complicated, for example why do I need to change to a specific perspective to perform a specific task?

I hear you. After a few years of Eclipse's goofy tiled interface, I switched over to NetBeans. I much prefer the undockable windows (make the editor use most of the screen, thank you very much), rather than having to pop up an extra Eclipse Window and then strip it down to edit, every time I started Eclipse.

http://roboprogs.com/devel/2009.09.html

The vim (key assignment) editor NB plugin is kind of useful as well.

You don't. I do everything from a single perspective.

Most new Eclipse users don't understand that you can configure your perspective with whichever windows you want. Which in itself is a kind usability fail on Eclipse's part.

Depending on what you are building, NetBeans is a great option. Its support for J2ME is excellent, for instance. I also prefer it for JSP stuff. I have used it to quickly cobble together Swing apps too and the new interface builder seems interesting. Never really tried it with PHP or C, but it doesn't look too bad. For Python an Django work, I like Emacs.

Like Tim said, Eclipse is overly and needlessly complicated.

As for IntelliJ, never bothered to try. It seems to have a very passionate user base, but, from what I saw, I don't know why.

It also has very good JavaScript support, I would say that in my opinion it is one of the top JavaScript IDE's. I also like it's JAX-RS tooling. I still get a lot of weird looks from people when I tell them I use Netbeans but several developers I know have switched after watching my workflow for web apps. That is the thing about Netbeans, it may not have the breadth that Eclipse has, but for the thing's that it is good for, it does them very well.

I use for it PHP and I really like it, especially with the Mercurial stuff built-in. I've heard Jetbrains PHP IDE is better but of all the others I've tried over the years, Netbeans is by far my favourite.

I really like PHP Storm (from Jetbrains). It's fast, feature-rich and under constant development. Couldn't recommend it more.

PHPStorm still isn't able to handle autocompletion for cascading class / folder structures, where there is more than one class/file with the same name (but in different folders) such as Kohana or FuelPHP:

http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/WI-2457?projectKey=WI...

That's one reason for me to keep using Netbeans, which I think is great for PHP.

Heh, I haven't paid for an IDE since Turbo C but I've yet to hear a bad word said against this one. If it doesn't suffer from the occasional memory gobbling antics of Netbeans then I might treat myself to an early birthday present.

You should! :) A couple of years ago I was skeptical, "Why would I pay that if I can get something good for free (Eclipse)?" Once I tried it for 2 months (now the trial only 30days), I couldnt help but buying the personal license. just happen that they had discount on easter.

License? Did that change in v7? I've been running various 6.x versions of NetBeans, and they were free.

They're talking about PHP Storm from Jetbrains, Netbeans is still free.

IIRC, IntelliJ was the first IDE to have intelligent refactoring features and be usable, at a time when Eclipse was an unbearable memory monster and quite feature-poor.

At least eclipse doesn't lack features now. ;)

I have been using netbeans and eclipse for a long time and can even remember using the abomination that was jbuilder... currently I am using an older netbeans version (6.1/6.8) for very specific product-centric development and it works just fine, there are a lot of great plugins to choose from and it integrates with pretty much all popular source control systems.

The same can be said for eclipse and I think there was a time when the eclipse framework was just so much "snappier" due to SWT that people forgot all about netbeans... but with more recent JDKs and more recent versions of netbeans, this isn't necessarily the case anymore.

IntelliJ has always seemed incredibly neat and those guys are doing a great job considering they are up against giants like sunoracle and IBM - personally the only thing that ultimately kept me from using intellij more at work was the price but I see they are offering personal licenses at a more reasonable price now so it is definitely a viable alternative to look at and try for devs.

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