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Comment by nahiluhmot | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why the site advertises "Just for OS X" as if it's a feature.

It is a feature. OSX applications have[1] a[2] certain[3] feel[4] to them. You won't have the same experience using a cross-platform app.

[1]: https://panic.com/coda/

[2]: http://www.pixelmator.com/mac/

[3]: http://macpaw.com/gemini

[4]: http://www.iawriter.com/mac/

Because it implies a fully native app, which is a feature to some people.

Because native applications generally work better than cross-platform ones?

Look better, yes. Work better, not necessarily.

It implies it's not a cross-platform port. Definitely a plus.

Which is why I said "generally" and not "always".

Have you tried using one of those IDEs written in Java?

Yes Pycharm and Webstorm are amazing

Minus the lack of Dvorak support :(-

Sans the Java part.

They are written in Java. The platform that they're built on is available on GitHub:

https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

IntelliJ uses a totally custom widget toolkit that actually looks great. But yeah, NetBeans isn't especially easy on the eyes.

I'm using Netbeans at work now, on a Mac, and the experience has been considerably less than ideal. The UI is almost, but not quite Mac-like (to be fair, when I've used it on Windows, the UI was almost-but-not-quite Windows-like) and I keep running up against things that seem like they should be configurable but are not.

It's like Netbeans was designed by people who had UIs described to them, then semi-randomly decided that was stupid and they could implement them better without doing any research about why those things were the way they were.

It works. It doesn't suck as much as it could. That's about the best I can say about it.

At least it's not Eclipse. So there's that.

Not-quite-Mac-like is way worse than not-at-all-Mac-like.

Look at Sublime and Atom. Completely customizable and identical across platforms. I'd prefer that level of honesty to the fake-Mac interfaces that try and fail to look native.

I love NetBeans on Windows, but it's terrible on Mac if you're a Dvorak typist and you want to use keyboard shortcuts. For some reason, when using the Dvorak layout, NetBeans can't decide whether to interpret a key press as Dvorak or QWERTY when using shortcuts, and often it uses both. For example, the W key in QWERTY is a comma in Dvorak. If you press Cmd-, to invoke the Preferences dialog, it interprets this as both Cmd-, and Cmd-W, so it brings up the Preferences dialog and closes the current file.

Oh dear god, Eclipse approaches Adobe-level awfulness of widget toolkit design.

IntelliJ has very good IDEs. But their IDEs would be even better were they native OS X applications. For example, you can't use the Mac OS X services like "Look up in a dictionary" in IntelliJ.

For me, it's the open and save dialogs that bother me most. I quite like the editor, especially as compared to Eclipse, but for source editing, I'd rather use one the OS X editors like TextMate or BBEdit.

I thought that it uses the native OS X file choosers unless you have ide.mac.filechooser.native set to false in the IntelliJ registry.

This isn't an IDE. The comparable type of editor that's cross platform is probably sublime. Have you tried using that?

Sublime is the best cross-platform app I've ever used. I can count on one finger the number of times I've used something that felt native on more than one platform.

Nooo, is it any good? Sorry pushing sarcasm too far. Of course I have to agree on that one.

That said I wish I didn't have to choose from this pick any two triangle of open source vs. cross-platform vs. gui.

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