You know, I just don't get the love for IntelliJ. I used to use Eclipse (or more often than not Spring Tool Suite) and I rather liked that. More and more I'm obliged to use IntelliJ and in comparison it just seems ... okay.

Its suggestions stuff is nice, and it works reasonably well. In particular it supports multiple languages much better than Eclipse's motley range of plugins. So I can see why your list of uses makes it the superior option there.

But for primarily Java development, which is where I encounter it and the most vocal love for it, it lacks a couple of key features (or non-obvious configuration to enable them I guess?)

* You can't run code unless the whole project compiles (poor for quick sanity check, test driven development, and refactoring breaking changes).

* You don't get the "problems" view of compilation issues (and optionally analysis output like findbugs) so as often as not I'll try to run a test, building the whole shebang, when the end result will be needing to fix a trivial syntax error. Eclipse tells me that first.

* It's a pain to use when working with multiple (source independent) projects simultaneously. E.g. a library project and the main project. Eclipse lets you open anything you want to in the same window and presents them in the same explorer view.

It also, anecdotally, feels slower than Eclipse, and seems to enjoy popping up focus-stealing windows more often than Eclipse (though I guess I can cuss Gnome just as much for that one).

I don't hate it, but I do miss Eclipse.

Edit: I should add that it supports Gradle rather better than Eclipse does, but since I really dislike Gradle I'm not sure how much of a plus that is!

> It's a pain to use when working with multiple (source independent) projects simultaneously. E.g. a library project and the main project. Eclipse lets you open anything you want to in the same window and presents them in the same explorer view.

That's a common confusion about IntelliJ.

Eclipse Workspace -> IntelliJ Project

Eclipse Project -> IntelliJ Module

In IntelliJ create an empty Project and import all your Maven or Gradle projects as Modules. Everything in one window :)

I will try this and report back :) thanks for the clarification!

Edit: Ok, report.

It's... close enough. I don't really like the need to create a new project to contain the "IntelliJ droppings" :) but honestly that's not that different from Eclipse's workspace directories.

Thanks for the tip!

There's a problems view! It's a bit hidden though. Go Help -> Find Action, type "Problems" and hit enter. You can also get to it by clicking the little red or yellow square in the top right of the editor.

Thanks, but it's not really the same thing (unless there's another feature somewhere).

Take a look at this comparison: https://paperstack.com/img/ides/eclipse_vs_idea_problems.png

In IntelliJ I can invoke this gizmo for the file I'm in, but it reports the problems for that file. It doesn't tell me where else the problems are. If I do a build I typically get a handful of compilation errors until the build gives up.

In Eclipse, by default, I get the Problems view. It lists all the compilation issues it knows about in the entire project(s).

Because Eclipse does incremental compilation I get to know about issues in a totally different file immediately. I also see stuff like config file errors in the same panel. It's really neat.

IntelliJ may have this feature somewhere, but this doesn't seem to be it.

> You can't run code unless the whole project compiles (poor for quick sanity check, test driven development, and refactoring breaking changes).

What do you mean by _running_ specific parts of the code? Isn't this a language problem (compile all dependencies (classes) to byte code, package .class files in jar files, define the main class, define the classpath, and then run)?

Eclipse uses a special compiler that can compile code even if it's got errors. Parts of the code that don't compile get compiled to just a stub that throws an exception.

Some devs really like this. I never really encounter it as a problem because for any refactoring, I prefer to use IntelliJ's refactoring tools that ensure all code (that's in your project at least) gets rewritten in the same moment the refactoring occurs.

> IntelliJ's refactoring tools that ensure all code (that's in your project at least) gets rewritten in the same moment the refactoring occurs

That's the same as Eclipse (e.g. rename method), right? What's the benefit of IntelliJ here?

Pretty much. They both have refactoring operations, but they're a slightly different set.

(Edit: Some of the IntelliJ operations are distinctly superior to the Eclipse ones. But not all. In my experience I'd say they're about even here.)

For example, in Eclipse it's trivial to take an inner class and move it to its own file. In IntelliJ that doesn't seem to be an option.

And that's a breaking change if I do it manually, which is where the Problems panel is so useful.

Not forgetting TDD where in Eclipse I can write multiple tests for a feature before any code exists and run them before the unit I'm testing even fully compiles!

For example, in this screenshot one of the methods the test class invokes doesn't exist: https://paperstack.com/img/ides/eclipse_run_broken_code.png

1. For static class: Refactor > Move Inner Class then choose from: a) move it to upper level (new java file), or b) move to another class

2. For non-static class: Refactor > Move Inner Class to Upper Level

Then you can select class name and parameter name of formerly enclosing class.

Ah yes, you're right. Maybe it's Groovy classes that this doesn't work for?

Still, when a refactoring operation doesn't exist for a code change (even if it's due to operator ignorance) it's nice to have the Problems pane to tidy up with.

I wonder if IDEA gained traction after Android Studio switched to it?

That's not the impression I get; it seemed to become super popular when Android was still on Eclipse (but I'm not an Android dev so a little hazy about the timelines).

Huh, well I certainly didn't know that (I've only just started playing around myself).

Ok, so according to Wikipedia, "Googles' ADT was the official IDE for Android until 2015 but was replaced by Eclipse's Andmore and the official Android Studio."

So I was slightly incorrect in that there seems to have been a name change at the same time (as I say, I'm not an Android dev, so I didn't know that).

I was definitely seeing IntelliJ in use, and hearing a lot of praise for it circa 2011 - 2013, so it does look to me like the love for it precedes the Android dev environment switch.

Except being a bit too strict about style. I've started using Rider midway in a project, its formatting didn't really follow a style. Now every time I paste stuff or do anything really the whole file gets reformatted. You can find lots of people complaining about that. And it's not a new problem either:

https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/po...

https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/po...

You can configure it to not auto format or format only modified lines, in addition to using whatever style formats you actually want...

Well, I (and the people in the tickets posting screenshots) have the autoformat on paste and other settings off but it still happens.

On top of that I've tried running code cleanup on the whole solution and it introduced bugs - I have an Image class in the project but it imported System.Drawing instead and prefixed the Image with some nonsense that didn't compile.

I think I'll stick to waiting here and there for the rusty Visual Studio 2019 rather than cleanup Rider's shit every commit

On the flipside, I find IntelliJ causes my computer to go into overdrive while VSC is pretty snappy. A shame because I love using their software. I guess I just need to get a new computer lol

That's because IntelliJ is creating an (I think) inverted index and dependency graph of your project for code completion/Intellisense and it uses multiple CPU cores to do this as fast as possible.

VSC won't do this to the same extent.

Inverted indexes are slow to create, but fast to query.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_index:

There are two main variants of inverted indexes: A record-level inverted index (or inverted file index or just inverted file) contains a list of references to documents for each word. A word-level inverted index (or full inverted index or inverted list) additionally contains the positions of each word within a document.

TL;DR, for every (key)word, list its file and position. A smart IDE implementation would also need to take file rename and move into account, and translate byte positions to line numbers for quick jump-to-file.

VSC != VS

I'm sure VS chugs power like IntelliJ too

> VSC != VS

Yes, but VSCode offers a lot of the functionality for a lot of the programming languages/frameworks OP mentioned he uses IntelliJ for. HTML, JS, CSS, Vue, Node, Python are all perfectly useable in VSCode. For stuff like Java and maybe SQL the full version of Visual Studio would be a fair comparison since VSCode's options for that aren't that amazing (imho).

I think it depends on the environment as to usablity: eg. on my home laptop, VSC is great; but on my locked-down corporate laptop everything is a slog library and extension-wise - Pycharm just works.

That's obviously a process issue to an extent, but there is only so much time I want to spend messing about with this stuff, and if an IDE doesn't have me fighting admin rights every minute, I'll go with that one.

I used Visual Studio extensively for Python development and occasional debugging of C#, it never once asked for admin privileges.

Wouldn't be surprised if there are issues with older versions though like VS2010 or before.

VSCode, not VS - I used the user version, which didn't require admin privileges but as soon as I started trying to install libraries (e.g. Pandas etc), no dice. Some environments may vary - but like I said, time is limited, no issues with Pycharm.

that was the primary driver to me moving full time into a linux VM for work. The corporate crap and antivirus made my overpowered laptop really slow.

I then moved to booting with an external Samsung T5 SSD drive straight into Linux and running Windows in VMs.

I still need the primary Windows for when I need to join the domain.

Similarly, it's a pain because I found IntelliJ was far better at auto-completing modules across a javascript mono-repo, but the performance was bad that I've switched to VSC despite it generally being worse experience

Wow.. I hate it... the quality of IntelliJ has really fallen. I've been using it for like 5 years now and I'm constantly fighting it

There are literally 20-40 serious bugs that impact me daily.

Do you have some examples? I've used IntelliJ or variants of it (Clion primarily in more recent years) since ~2004 and rarely had any issues, but it's possible I'm missing some obvious things here.

macos + 4k display [0] = enormous performance issues even on mac pro

[0] https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-526

Wow, never had this, I use IntelliJ (for java) many hours everyday with 2x4k@60Hz screens (both running with hidpi scaling so even more pixels than 2x4k) and it’s always running smoothly. Running MBP 16”.

This has been my exact setup (except 15" instead of 16") for four years now, and I also have never had problems.

Yep, and that issue has been open for FIVE YEARS. The related issue which promises a fix has "only" been open for two, however: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-745

Interesting - my own setup is the built-in 15" high DPI display, an LG 5k display and a Dell 49" ultrawide with a low DPI. I've not really experienced this. Probably scaling mode or similar.

I find this with all IDEs; quality is dropping fast and bugs do not get fixed. I find myself reaching for emacs more and more.

VSCode is the one exception IME. The base editor is improving and the range of high-quality extensions is growing.

Eg installing and running the Lombok extension is a one-liner. I fought for about an hour trying to do the same on Eclipse.

Clearly it's not the case with _all_ IDEs then.

But emacs is an OS, no? :)

Yes, I'd love to know some of the bugs that you are talking about.

Curious to know your top 3?

Although I have the hots for intellij IDEA too, does it count as enterprise?

Good question. I reckon the answer is mixed: some customers are individuals -- where the person who decides to make the purchase is the end user -- some customers are small businesses, while some customers are enterprises. It does appear to have some business & enterprise functionality - at least around how license management works (having some people with permission to manage a pool of licenses for the software that can be granted or withdrawn to individual users in an org). I wonder what fraction of intellij's customers are individuals, small businesses, vs enterprises. My hypothesis is that software that is sold to individuals, where the purchaser is the same as the end user, has more evolutionary pressure not to be awful.

It'd be interesting to ask "what is the best enterprise software you use that is ONLY sold to enterprise customers and never to individuals" as there's more pressure on such software not to be usable.

Well, I'm cheap. I wouldn't use it if my enterprise company didn't pay for it. If I had to pay for it, I'd find something free.

I used to use it for Scala, sometimes the editor would hang for 30-40s (probably even more but I don't want to sound like I'm exagerating.) I moved back to Emacs+Metals which suits me better (it's hard to leave Emacs after 20+ years of use.)

Nevertheless I still think Intellij is an awesome piece of software and I still start it sometimes to get useful features which are not available in Metals, like inline type annotations for long method chains (really useful when coding with Cats) or "show implicit hints" to see which implicits are used / missing and where.)

Intellij is awesome, and I use it for Scala with Emacs keybindings as well but like you said, the performance is just atrocious. Memory leaks, stutters, hangs, bad latency, you name it. Every Scala dev team I've been on constantly curses at Intellij. And yet, no one switches, because the functionality it provides is so good.

I never could get ensime to work, but I should try metals.

Ensime is not maintained anymore, I'd say the experience has been better with Metals for at least 2 or 3 versions now than it every was with Ensime.

Give Metals a try! Following the instructions in the docs is enough to get a good working environment.

Most of this is the Scala plugin. I eventually stopped writing Scala because of this and other reasons.

That’s weird; I’ve been using it with Scala for the past year without any major issues.

This is very language dependent. With Kotlin and especially Java it flies for me.

Totally agree man, is the all-in-one programmer software (if you know how to use it though). I see colleagues with 10 different software to do their job, I just need phpstorm.

I want to try it but their whole suite of tools lacks support for my keyboard layout (admittedly weird, but system supported on macOS) so no keyboard shortcuts work.

Yeah JetBrains IDEs are nice. I use their CLion IDE for Rust and also for web stuff.

I'd question whether IntelliJ is "enterprise software" though?