Well I started going back to school online, and that means ... you guessed it, Java classes!

Instructors recommended jGRASP, but I tried it briefly and did not like it too much. So, I have been playing with IntelliJ Community Edition in parallel and I prefer it. Anecdotally, I have not had the same performance issues, but I do use it on 8GB RAM + SSD laptop. So, I might be lucky by privilege here.

In the community edition, at least, there is Power Save mode. I think this halts project file indexing and other "cool" features. Maybe it would help? I also was surprised my computer was not hosed when playing with the Clojure REPL plugin, but again my laptop could be very beefy.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11725605/what-is-power-sa...

That being said, I need to do this school work on a work laptop because I got a Kindle textbook and I have not had time to convert it into PDF/ePub for use on my Linux laptop. I would love to use eclim and emacs, but that seems like a headache waiting to happen on Winboxen. Does anyone do Java/Scala dev on a Windows machine without one of the very unminimalist IDE's? I would much prefer console based, but Cygwin emacs is flimsy as it is.

http://eclim.org/install.html

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsEclim

If you want IntelliJ on windows to be fast:

* change the default launcher to use the idea64.exe instead of idea.exe

* increase the default vm allocation in bin/idea64.vmoptions

-Xms668m -Xmx1692m -XX:MaxPermSize=412m -XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=246m

* disable the "SuperFetch" service of windows 8 and reboot

I would actually set Xms == Xmx, as you can easily fill up your entire heap... why let the JVM manage total heap size in a tool when you can predict the heap size? (For the record I use ~2g Xms and Xmx for Java projects, and ~3g Xms and Xmx for Scala projects).

Also you can ditch MaxPermSize if using Java8, which you should.

but of course if you really want faster compiles, just run linux and install your workspace in an ext4 filesystem on an ssd.

Use Eclipse for an hour. You'll feel much better when you go back to IDEA.

Eclipse gave me headaches in the past (old days of Android). I don't usually do Java, but when I do, IDEA is the IDE I use. It's great.

I use intellij at work, but they gave me a macbook pro with 16GB of ram and a SSD. It still manages to beachball once in a while, but the functionality is worth it.

At home on my desktop (4Gb of ram and a HDD) I switched to Emacs + ensime. It has a subset of the functionality of Intellij (some refactoring, jump to definition, type inference, autocompletion) and Emacs commands are hardwired in my brain. It's lighter than Intellij, you could check it out (and add some vim emulation since you seem to be a vim user!)

edit: there are ensime integration solutions for vim ( eg: https://github.com/megaannum/vimside )

It depends on the language you're using (working with Scala is usually slow). Also, make sure that IntelliJ caches are on an SSD. VS is very quick, but for example parsing C# is very easy compared to Scala (partly because C# was designed for that from day zero). Maven also slows down things a bit (IntelliJ can search in classes that are not even referenced by the project.)

Good points. I have no SSD, unfortunately.

There are two types of slow: there is slow to react, and slow to respond. I can understand that IntelliJ is having a hard time recompiling the Scala source. As you said, Scala is difficult to parse and compile.

What I don't like is the context menu taking several seconds to even appear, locking up the entire UI (!), when I right click. Or music playback going haywire just because I am switching files or refactoring. Setting it to "low priority" solves that last issue, but that doesn't make me feel better about IntelliJ.

If an app is slow, fine. But deal with it. React quickly, respond later.

PS: I say that now, but once I have a better computer, it's all "IntelliJ is great." I only feel this way because my computer can't take it.

I've heard that the correct way to parse a Scala program is dependent on the types in it. I think maybe that's why IDEs are so wrong about where your errors are unless you terminate each statement with ";"

Never used a ; in scala and my IJ is pretty dang good at figuring it out. Catches maybe 95% of errors, and SBT will catch the last 5%. (Okay sometimes you can use a ; in a for comprehension to be fancy but you don't usually need to)

FYI if someone is reluctant to give up their HDD capacity at the price point an SSD exists, I've had really good luck with IDEA and Pycharm on my Seagate 2.5 1 TB Hybrid (ST1000LM014). I think they can be found on NewEgg for like $70 (for 1 TB), and work well for the sort of caching IDEA tends to do.

I gave up on IntelliJ and went back to NetBeans because of the bass-ackwards way IntelliJ handles Maven projects. There's no need for both IntelliJ's project file and the POM to track dependencies. In fact, there's no need for IntelliJ to maintain its own project file at all outside the POM.

Well, you might need both. The POM only contains information on how to build the project, while the IntelliJ project file also contains extra information that might be personalized, things like tab size, JDK version, and millions of other things. My policy is to only put the POM into VCS, and keep the .idea stuff only on the local box.

NetBeans just has the nbactions.xml file, which defines a small number of things like the main class and some context menu actions (this is very useful for OSGi projects, where you often have to switch between different build/run profiles). It's pretty lightweight, and it leaves everything else to the POM.

Oh, and on that note, that wasn't the only reason I left IntelliJ. I also disliked how it handled having multiple projects open. If you don't want everything in separate windows, IntelliJ makes you create a dummy project and import everything as modules. NetBeans just does what I want automatically.

Where does the POM specify the path to the JDK you should use to compile with?

Where does the POM specify the project specific code formatting you want to use?

Where does the POM specify the exact JVM flags and params given to various launch configs?

It could be a problem with developing specifically with scala, right now I'm running on a linux VM with only 6gb of ram and no issues at all (I do have an SSD now but even before with a mechanical disk it wasn't slow)

I also used it on windows 7 with 8gb of ram and no speed issues either, always developing java or android (ends up being java)

The current version Android Development Studio (its based on IntelliJ) is even worse, even after applying all the recommended settings. After loading up a Gradle project, building and running (which can take forever), its memory usage shoots up to about 1GB even when idle. My Visual Studio 2013 Solution with 7 Projects (with Resharper) takes just more than half of that under the same conditions.

http://i.imgur.com/bDk4OWJ.png

Now I'm a big fan of aggressive RAM usage, but the problem is Android Dev Studio always seems to want to grab everything it can. Which means that eventually I'm going to need disk swap space and that just causes my machine to slow down tremendously.

I have a MBP from about 1.5 years ago, 8GB RAM and SSD and I don't notice any issues w/ intellij and scala, which I use daily. However for a while I had a MBP with a standard HD and that was painful every time it indexed.

Yes indexing is a pain, even with an SSD depending on project size, but its worth the wait.