Comment by StevePerkins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by StevePerkins | Hacker News Reader

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Honestly, I feel like the primary reason why IntelliJ "won" over Eclipse and Netbeans was that it was first to market with a decent-looking dark mode. Back when Eclipse and Netbeans were as stark white as Windows Notepad... and caught with their pants down as developers abruptly decided en masse that white backgrounds were over, and every app needed to be dark mode first.

Hell, Eclipse STILL doesn't really have a nice dark mode. The actual editor view looks okay, but the dark mode feels very bolted-on to the surrounding UI.

I think this is the primary reason why VSCode is eating the world today. People will talk about the plugin ecosystem and all these other community inertia advantages. However, VSCode was exploding in popularity BEFORE that plugin ecosystem was in place! If we're really honest with ourselves, we flocked to because it was even more gorgeous looking than Sublime Edit, and without the nag modal to pay someone 70-something dollars.

Appearances MATTER.

JetBrains “won” because of code inspection tools and code completion that was light years ahead of Eclipse and Netbeans. I remember in my Java days I used to be able to do in a keystroke what my Eclipse friends did in a dozen dialogs.

I don't disagree, but my anecdotal experience from working with peers is that the overwhelming majority of IntelliJ users never learn a small fraction of the keyboard shortcuts and advanced tooling.

I really do believe that for most people, IntelliJ is basically a VSCode that: (1) has a better debugger and some more polish around Maven/Gradle integration, and (2) came out 10+ years sooner.

But ~10 years ago, everyone I knew was flocking over because IntelliJ felt less slow and bloated than Eclipse, and its dark mode UI was more attractive in comparison. Then it became the more-or-less official way to develop Android apps (back when Android's U.S. market share was a lot higher), and that was all she wrote.

No, dark mode is a red herring. I used IntelliJ because it had better functionality and wasn't incredibly slow (only somewhat slow).

User experience matters. Most of user experience has nothing to do with dark mode. Dark mode is pure fashion, and should be prioritized appropriately.

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