Hacker News Reader

Comment by norswap | Hacker News Reader

I find the comments are not very helpful. I am myself familiar with Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA (my assessment based on experience is that both are equally powerful and pleasant to use, excepted that IDEA is much much more stable). How does NetBeans compare? Does it have any specific feature worth mentioning?

View on HN

Being free from the tyranny of Eclipse workspaces is, on its own, damn nice.

If you're the type that likes your version control integrated in your IDE, SVN and git feel much more natural in NetBeans than the Team Provider implementations in Eclipse. Eclipse requires navigating to the source control perspective, adding the repository, checking out, and then selecting the option to look for projects which you can open in your workspace.. its not exactly a smooth process. NB is more akin to what you'd do if your terminal was open.

In terms of stability, NB definitely wins there. Never crashes and none of the typing slow downs that used to bug me [what seemed like] all the time in Eclipse.

The one incredibly irritating thing about it is the way it forks processes when running via maven. Start an http server with netty and hit stop, the process is still running. I've taken to doing most of my testing from a terminal, which is a somewhat janky process I've forced myself to get used to.

Remember mount points? At least the Netbeans developers learned that workspaces as Eclipse does it makes no sense.

I really love being able to use Ant and Maven as project files, without internal IDE lifecycle builders like Eclipse requires.

I can't believe nobody has mentioned the one feature of Netbeans that is completely unrivaled by neither IntelliJ nor Eclipse: the integrated profiler.

Yes, you can use VisualVM. However, it is essentially a standalone version of the Netbeans profiler, that lags behind in terms of features and gives you bad to no IDE integration.

Just to position myself: I started coding Java in Eclipse, and I love its powerful refactoring capabilities but otherwise hate pretty much everything else about it. Then I switched to Netbeans, where I felt way more comfortable, but still got annoyed by the occasional hangs and sluggish response. Now I'm primarily using IntelliJ, which has the best of both worlds in terms of refactoring power, ease of use and interface slickness. However, i still go back to Netbeans from time to time just because of the profiler.

For profiling I'm pretty happy with JRockit Mission Control in Eclipse[1]. Plus, jvmmonitor[2] is a good lighter alternative, and there is YourKit[3] as well.

[1] http://download.oracle.com/technology/products/missioncontro...

[2] https://code.google.com/a/eclipselabs.org/p/jvmmonitor/

[3] http://www.yourkit.com/overview/index.jsp

I realize this doesn't contain specifics but I haven't used anything other than IntelliJ for some time so I can only offer my impression...

I went from Eclipse (which I never liked as it always felt slow and clunky) to Netbeans (which I liked a lot) to IntelliJ products and in my opinion Netbeans is very similar to the IntelliJ products only a bit slower and perhaps a tiny bit less capable.

I would say that IntelliJ's products are a 9, Netbeans is an 8 and Eclipse is a 4.

I use it for C++ and have found the refactoring feature to die for. Couple to vim bindings and its my Linux goto.

I'm using it for c development for the GT OMSCS Advanced Operating Systems course, and it was a life saver. I tried Eclipse, Sublime Text and plain old VIM. NetBeans got to stay. Why? it doesn't crash, it's lightweight, it works very well with GDB, good warnings / errors highlighting etc. I'm still checking the new 8 features, but I was missing things like introduce local variable or extract variable. can't wait till intellij release a decent C/C++ IDEA...

I haven't used Eclipse in quite some time, but I do use IntelliJ occasionally. I like NetBeans' gradle integration (plugin), and I think the UI is a lot more simple and intuitive than IntelliJ (it's a lot easier to figure out how to do something). Also, I think it's quite pretty and elegant.

But it boils down to personal preference. Both IntelliJ and NetBeans are terrific IDEs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com