One of the new features is better performance, particularly with indexing: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/
It might be worthwhile to give it a try just for that feature alone.
By the "slightly older version", which version number do you mean?
Re:IntelliJ IDEA 12 Released
by georgemcbay on Wednesday December 05, 2012 @07:45PM
(#4879578)
I am not the parent poster, but I would assume he's talking about using Indigo (3.8.x) and not Juno (4.2.x). Eclipse took a speed hit with Juno. A hit which seems to vary depending upon your system from "a bit slower" to "OMG, how can anyone use this"?
On the Core i7 Windows laptop box I use for work, it fell into that "OMG, how can anyone use this?" category and I'm still using Indigo.
Google "eclipse juno slow" and you'll see a ton of hits. I know they've been taking steps to address this partly by using funds Google donated to Eclipse for the purpose of having more test machines to deal with this specific issue, but I haven't had a compelling reason to see if newer releases of Juno really fix the problems for me.
It has much, much better plugin support e.g. AWS, Google CodePro. If you use the slightly older version then it is an order of magnitude faster than IntelliJ and generally works much nicer on OSX. It is also less cluttered meaning more room for code for those on laptops.
Also IntelliJ's indexing of files on startup is completely insane. It maxes out my CPU for at a minute or so which is never good on a laptop.
IntelliJ is nice and I use it at work but it is hardly some amazing piece of engineering that its supporters love to tell me it is. In fact I have found it to be generally quite buggy.