yes IDEA is file based and much clearer. You can open a directory as a project. Done. (no import in workspace, weird syncs ....) Eclipse has inherited this behavior from visualage for smalltalk where in smalltalk it kinda make sense but for java ?

Honestly: yes. I find IDEA much easier to use. It has hundreds of shortcuts, but the basic ones match other editors.

That's hard to take, considering how long it took me to stop pressing ctrl-y for redo when I switched to intellij.

It's not just that it doesn't do what you expect, it's that what it does do is disasterous for someone who was expecting redo (because it destroys your forwards edit action tree).

IJ's mac settings are absurd. But you can change the settings to whatever you like. I've synched up my keystrokes from IntelliJ/RubyMine/AppCode and Sublime Text 2.

IDEA is a better laid out in my opinion. Eclipse was just a mess for my tastes.