IntelliJ (actually Android Studio based on IntelliJ) was my first real IDE and real programming experience. I was so blown away !
Almost 15 years later, nothing else matches the out of the box experience of IntelliJ, atleast for JVM based languages.
Almost 15 years later, nothing else matches the out of the box experience of IntelliJ, atleast for JVM based languages.
I switched to IntelliJ back when people where still arguing which of the two between Eclipse or NetBeans was better (fools!): that is, before some of the commenters here were born.
Heck, I bought IntelliJ when the world was ending in the Mayan calendar, it was something like 75% off because the world was going to end in a few weeks anyway.
But since 10+ years I'm using only... Emacs.
Emacs now with tree-sitter, LSPs, native-compilation, magit and the LLMs at ease with Un*x CLI tools make it so that IntelliJ looks like a behemoth. From a glorious past but still a behemoth.
This week I had an LLM help me debug and resolve a subtle issue with Magit via TRAMP on macOS targets, and resolve it, plus a bunch of other small enhancements and fixes to my config. If your LLM agents have access to your Emacs config and installed packages, they can be really helpful in co-exploring your setup, explaining the behavior of built-ins as well as third-party plugins, and drafting new configuration.
Development is active, there are still great Emacs teachers creating books, blog posts, and videos, LLMs are genuinely good with Emacs, and the LSP ecosystem for Emacs is increasingly mature and well-integrated. There's never been a better time to jump in with Emacs, seriously.
It's not trivial though and it's a good thing I am willing to tinker and explore. I got a decent Neovim development setup going in a few days with the help of blog posts but Emacs is a whole different story, with a lot of legacy terminology and a lot of very sporadic resources. Doom suffered (for me) from a lot of complexity, assumed emacs knowledge, and confusion for how to customize. Emacs Kickstart was closer to a jumping off point but still had a lot of confusing things going for it.
I'm still making the leap because I see the potential to have a truly customizable IDE that's customized to me (and not throwing AI things at me every few weeks) but sheesh, it's not trivial.
To this day there isn't anything like C++ Builder, if you want the famous VB dev experience, but with C++.