The fancy version costs money, yes, but the community edition is free and Apache licensed. Here's the source code: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community
> is there another major cause for most of the world drifting to the inferior choice?
I've used both Eclipse and IntelliJ, as well as JetBrain's "ReSharper" tool in Visual Studio, and while the UI is obviously different, and in some ways better, some ways worse than Eclipse, the actual functionality and feature set of IntelliJ is clearly superior to Eclipse, especially all the refactoring and code smell tools.
The feature list is just incredible and constantly increasing: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/
Also, IdeaVim is way superior to Eclim, if you care about Vim keybindings and modal editing.
Clearest example I've seen in a long time of why copyleft licenses are important.
EDIT: I was wrong about this, see below thread.
I was also confused before when browsing through Google's Android repos because they don't seem to do any development on the master branch: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/idea/+/maste... ...instead developing on project or release-specific branches: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/idea/+/studi...
I have to say, I'm glad to have been wrong!
I'm betting the menu content is dynamic (based on preferences, maybe the code that's on the screen etc.) and they're recomputing the content before drawing it - but still, it's no excuse.
IntelliJ has almost all important plugins and languages built-in. Even some quite nice frameworks.
Think about it. As you are editing and saving, a real compiler is recompiling your code. Any and all errors show up as feedback in the IDE immediately. Intellij tries to guess errors for you, but I find that it often misses things until you run a build manually.
In conjunction with automatic incremental compilation is the problems window. I can't find anything remotely like it in Intellij. In a single window I can see all the errors and warnings in my workspace and address them. This is tremendously helpful, for instance, when I'm doing a complicated refactoring that can't be completely automated.
Another insanely awesome feature of this compiler is that it compiles class files with errors in them. This lets you do things like run your program even if there are compiler errors in your project, or, even more usefully, run a unit test. In Intellij I get so frustrated when I can't run a unit test because some entirely unrelated java file in an entirely separate module has a compiler error because I haven't refreshed my gradle project since pulling from git.
I really like seeing the warnings too. In every Intellij-driven project I've seen people do not care at all about warnings and the result is a lot sloppier code, including way more code that uses raw types, code that performs unchecked generic casts, code that makes mistakes with serialization, etc. In this sense Eclipse encourages better coding practices by putting the warnings your face in the problems tab.
I've had the opposite experience with plugins in Eclipse. I've found that there's way more plugins than in Intellij and that they work better. For instance, I completely gave up on Intellij's code coverage builtin plugin. It flat out wasn't working. On the other hand, the plugin I've tried in Eclipse works great. I've also found Eclipse's FindBugs and Checkstyle plugins to work way better for me.
I really dislike how Intellij handles debugging and spawning sub-processes. I remember at $lastjob when I still used Eclipse and I was helping an Intellij user try to debug something. I helped him figure out that he actually had about 5 sub-processes running in a debugger already and they were conflicting with each other. This kind of mistake I think is much harder to make in Eclipse. I also love the debug perspective and how it is separated from the regular perspective.
I could go on and on. I've found Eclipse to always be much snappier and more responsive than Intellij and to use less memory. I've found its code formatter to be more feature rich and useful. I like Eclipse's look and feel a lot better. Intellij uses Swing and it shows. But, at the end of the day, above all else, its the incremental compilation and everything that builds off of it. I have to use Intellij at my current job and I absolutely wish we could use Eclipse instead.
I find for instance that Intellij leaks memory and I frequently have to restart it once it gets to 8+ GB of usage. Also If I give it less than 6 GB of heap it runs insanely slowly.
Compilation in VS occurs at the project level. When you change a single file in the project, the entire project must be recompiled to generate the assembly. Eclipse on the other hand can recompile at the level of individual files, which is way faster, fast enough that it auto-compiles for you on save and the updates the editor with all errors and warnings discovered. No other IDE I am aware of can do this effectively.
Facepalm
I run into thousands of moronic things like that on an average work week
Honestly, I'm curious. It's never occurred to me that having it there, even if you don't use it, could be problematic. What is it touching that bothers you so much? It's not like it's going to jump in your folder and start committing stuff at random.
More keyboard shortcuts! = better. In eclipse I probably used 10...still hunting for the equivalent. Then there's the fact that some shortcuts require two hands, or a large hand. If you're focused on debugging and you need to step out... Shift F8?
Also the amount of times IntelliJ caches old files and screws up my testing is as much as eclipse... Which is probably my my biggest time waster. At least Intellij has the invalidate cache and restart... Which mostly works, till it doesn't, then I need to reimport.
When I switched to IntelliJ, I suffered from none of those problems and it did not take me long before I went and purchased a personal license.
So a better answer may be, they have been improving their sales team.
But I’ll retract my downvote if you add any reasons for why you think eclipse is superior?
Because downvoting isn't intended to stifle someone else's perfectly valid opinion maybe?
IntelliJ is snappy, has a far better search function, makes better use of screen space, lets me keep working while it compiles, and has yet to corrupt one of my projects. I've used both, personally, and for work, for a couple of years. I will take IntelliJ every time.
[1] All the menus fading out, and becoming uninteractible, as it starts recompiling.