
IntelliJ IDEA 12 Wins Jolt Award for Coding Tools 2013 - rdemmer
http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2013/02/intellij-idea-12-wins-jolt-award-for-coding-tools-2013/
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henrik_w
Well deserved. I've been using IntelliJ IDEA (Java) for the past four years.
Before that, I used Emacs coding C++. I was pretty amazed at how much more
productive I became using an IDE (just for the mechanics of coding, like auto-
completion, jump to suource etc - not counting any differences between C++ and
Java). I still like Emacs a lot, but using a good IDE just took coding to the
next level. More details: [http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/17/programmer-
productivity-em...](http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/17/programmer-productivity-
emacs-versus-intellij-idea/)

~~~
mgkimsal
Same here, but a vim guy. "Jump to source" alone makes an IDE worthwhile, and
it still surprises me to this day that people eschew IDEs because of 'bloat',
and instead prefer adding dozens of brittle extensions to
vim/emacs/sublime/whatever to make up for what's missing.

I understand speed - I use vim for quick edits/changes - but simply being able
to jump to the source of a function you're looking at is huge (yes I know
about ctags for vim - doesn't even feel like it comes close).

EDIT: One of the other huge benefits of IDEs in general is working with and
studying code that you didn't write yourself. All the sublime and textmate
fans I know are almost always just writing their own code from scratch, or
using a small subset of well-known plugins for popular framework X. Taking
code written by someone you didn't know, who perhaps didn't even know language
foo very well, is a pain that is lessened somewhat by using a capable IDE vs a
plain text editor.

~~~
lucian1900
Almost all popular IDEs are extremely slow. Intellij is unusable on my 8 core
8 GB ram laptop.

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mgkimsal
definitions of 'unusable' vary greatly. 16gb 2ghz quadcore 2011 mbp with 256g
SSD and intellij is usable about 95% of the time - I get slow downs and hangs,
but their OS-level stuff - I get the same stuff hangs in macvim, textwrangler,
eclipse, pixelfari and other apps.

~~~
lucian1900
Unusable as it very often freezes for about 5-60secs. Only IDEs written in
Java appear to suffer from this, and that's most of them.

I _want_ a good IDE, but none of them are good.

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buster
I've bought PyCharm and WebStorm recently when they sold it for 75% off last
year and i must say i am extremely well pleased. Up until today i would've
thought SublimeText2 is enough, but PyCharm just kicks ass, with its
vagrant/debugging/ssh/sftp/intellisense/unittests/sphinx integration.

Thanks Jetbrains, for a great IDE!

~~~
csmatt
Damn, I guess I missed the discount, but it doesn't bother me much at all.
I've used eclipse, netbeans, visual studio, and I'm sure a few others. In my
opinion, a good IDE doesn't get in your way and makes life easier when you
need it. I started using intellij at work and found it to be a breath of fresh
air and in such compliance with my previously stated definition that I, for
the first time ever, personally paid for IDE software (PyCharm). The only
thing that comes close is VS and that's only when working on dot net stuff.
They have 30 day trials and I suggest you give them a shot. It'll make
whatever you're currently using feel like it's from 20 years ago.

~~~
buster
Exactly, it doesn't have to get in your way and that is what PyCharm is doing.
Interestingly, after buying i had the need for some easy python debugging and
was surprised how well it works, even "remotely" on a vagrant machine. The
vagrant and remote deployment/debugging integration is probably the feature i
love most. Oh.. and the virtualenv/pip integration. ;)

p.s.: the discount (of all jetbrains products!) was around december 21st.

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Sindisil
Very well deserved!

My primary Java IDE had been NetBeans for years, mostly because the rough
edges in Eclipse outweighed the extra functionality.

Recently I've been doing some Android programming, and found the native lib
support in nbandroid to be suboptimal at best.

Idea works swimmingly in the same situation, and Eclipse well enough, so my
options were to muddle along with manual build system changes in NB, add
necessary functionality to NBAndroid, or switch.

Since I spend a huge chunk of my time coding C (NB's C support is actually
quite nice), I've been giving Eclipse a go. It's come along rather well, I
must say.

That said, if Idea were to add official C & C++ support, I'd be on it like
white on rice. I very much prefer to use one primary tool, minimizing
switching back and forth, so using Idea for some languages & platforms and NB
or Eclipse for others just isn't palatable. Idea is almost good enough to make
me consider a two IDE world, though (this from a "vim unless I'm doing Java"
guy, up until a few months ago).

Sadly, I've run into an aspect of CDT that might be enough to push me back to
NetBeans, even if it means doing some additional work. It seems that CDT
language aware search (such as "find references") takes pre-processor
directives into account.

So, when searching for, say, a function name (or worse, doing a "rename"
refactoring), I'll only find a subset of occurrences, depending upon what
symbols I have defined for a given build configuration. For personal code,
that may not be an issue, as I tend to eschew ifdefs in favor of using
different implementation files resolved by platform specific make targets.

However, the main code bases I work with daily are littered with #ifdef WIN32
and #ifdef TRACE_ON and such.

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codex
I've used Emacs, Vim, Eclipse, Visual Slickedit, Sublime Text 2, and
JetBrains' IDEs. For C++, Slickedit is king, followed closely by Eclipse, but
soon I think AppCode will give them both a run for their money. For all other
mainstream languages JetBrains' products win hands down. For the rest either
Emacs, Vim, or ST2 will do.

The difference between using a real IDE and an editor with hacked IDE
extensions is like the difference between hunting with a rifle and hunting
with a bow and arrow. If you're skilled enough, both will work. If you're set
in your ways you may prefer the bow, and the bow offers a more primal
experience and requires more dedication. The bow is certainly more badass. But
the rifle just boosts your productivity immensely.

The one downside of IDEs is that they can encourage a bit of sloppiness. The
tool automates so much you want it to automate it all, but there is still no
substitute for a good working memory and careful study and thought.

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stephenhuey
Jetbrains rocks, and I don't even own any stock. I've been out of the Java
world for a few years, but when I was a young padawan I wanted to use IntelliJ
at an investment bank but they wouldn't pay for it since Eclipse was
available. Now I know it'd have been worth the productivity boost to pay for a
license myself, because I currently use both RubyMine and TextMate at work,
but I find that RubyMine helps me get more done and I can find my way around
large projects more easily. RubyMine 5 was just released and it's fast, and
it's also kind of cute when it points out that a line of code doesn't look
like the Ruby style guide. :)

FWIW, I just discovered VIM Adventures a week or so ago, and I'm planning to
try to give it a chance to win me over:

<http://vim-adventures.com/>

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mattquiros
I'd like to hear someone's comparison of IntelliJ and Eclipse. I've used both,
but because most books and online tutorials on Java revolve around Eclipse
(even Google recommends it for Android development), it's my primary IDE and
feel quite locked into it. NetBeans comes second because this is the only
other IDE I often see in other resources.

My only experience with IntelliJ is with a job I quit within a month because
they were using some boring proprietary Java framework that has almost no
documentation. I have no qualms about IntelliJ, I think it's pretty, looks a
lot like NetBeans, but I don't think I've fully maximized its features (heck,
I can only say it's pretty). I also hear a lot of people say that IntelliJ is
the best IDE for Java. What makes it so much better than Eclipse, and maybe
even NetBeans?

~~~
KMag
IntelliJ's @Nullable annotations are a decent workaround to my biggest
complaint about Java. (Java has a static type system that intentionally
doesn't catch the most common type error.)

On the NetBeans subject: does NetBeans have much traction outside of
Sun/Oracle? It's been a while since I've done any Java development, but back
in 2005, it seemed that pretty much only the official Java tutorials used
NetBeans.

~~~
thebluesky
Netbeans started getting some major traction around the 2005 - 2007 timeframe,
but seems to have lost ground since the Oracle takeover. Limited support for
Ruby/JRuby and virtually non-existent Scala support caused me to ditch it
after many years of use.

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Osiris
I've been using Sublime Text 2 for the past year or so, but I recently picked
up a copy of PhpStorm (by the same company) during their last 75% sale.

I've been using that ever since and almost never use ST2 anymore (I really
miss multiple-cursors, so I still use it for that).

PhpStorm gives me so much more information about the code, such as validating
types (based on type hinting), showing warnings when the wrong type is used,
automatically updates DocBlocks with correct information, allows very fast
jumping to the source code of a function call, quickly find all references to
a specific function or class, intelligent popup of callable functions on an
object (again, using Type Hinting to know the object's type).

It's really been a huge difference. Yes, there are some weird things to get
used to (default OS X keymap uses a lot of non-standard keys), but overall
it's pretty damn useful.

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Erwin
I converted from many years' of using xemacs to pycharm (which is really a
subset of the full if Intellij IDEA) and I'm mostly happy. When I started with
xemacs in 2000 or so I made a few minor modes and tweaks but with years things
started breaking mysteriously; xemacs was also mostly abandoned compared to
GNU emacs but many of my settings were not compatible.

Pycharm gave me overall a better out of the box experience, though at a heavy
resource cost (I have 3 branches of my project open and use 1 GB of memory).
I've paid maybe 150 EUR to JetBrains for that, but there simply isn't anyone
that I could pay 150 EUR to to get a similar experience with emacs.

I'm happy to pay JetBrains even more in yearly renewal costs to make the
editor even better.

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manuletroll
I don't use IDEA but Jetbrains does make amazing tools. I couldn't survive
without Resharper.

~~~
benparsons
I have never used IDEA, but if it is even a fraction as good as ReSharper then
it is still amazing. After being introduced to it I feel so handicapped
without it when using plain Visual Studio.

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tomlu
IntelliJ is pretty awesome, and works great for Android development too in
case anyone hasn't tried it yet. It's a pity its vim emulator (IdeaVim) is
pretty bad compared to the other Java IDEs.

~~~
CoffeeDregs
Hmm... I like IdeaVIM (though I don't use any particularly complicated VIM
commands). How does IdeaVIM lack?

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treerex
For me the advantage of Emacs over a set of IDEs is its ability to support
multiple languages very well within a single unified environment. In a typical
day I'm writing Common Lisp, C++, XML, XSLT, shell scripts, documentation. The
only time I'm not working in Emacs is when I switch to Eclipse for the odd
Java project, because that's what everyone else uses in my department.

Have a I spent a lot of time customizing my environment? Absolutely. But it
fits me like a well oiled leather glove and makes me incredibly productive. I
don't need to learn separate environments for Lisp, C++, XML...

A lot of this is personal preference and familiarity. When I sit down with
Visual Studio or XCode I'm completely lost and feel like I'm wearing shackles.

~~~
nilkn
I love a good IDE (RubyMines, for example), and in general a well-engineered
IDE designed from the ground up for your language and development stack is
going to be superior to emacs or vim.

However, I'd feel crippled overall as a developer if I didn't know one of
those two (vim in my case). For one thing, a lot of the best IDEs are not free
and some are very pricey. I'm not going to go out on a huge spending spree
buying a bunch of IDEs just for little experiments I want to do in my spare
time. More importantly, though, it is quite often at work that I need to edit
code in a variety of languages, and it is simply more productive to be able to
edit the code in one editor rather than having to fire up multiple IDEs. Not
to mention the need to occasionally make quick edits from within a terminal.

Using vim frequently also keeps me up to speed on terminal commands for lots
of modern tools. When I was in college I used IDEs almost exclusively, and
whenever I found myself needing to do something from the terminal, my God it
sucked. I was crippled. Now I feel more like a jack of all trades who can be
productive in mostly any environment.

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mmahemoff
Jolt was such a big phenomenon in the '90s. Do developers consume less
caffeine now or maybe Red Bull cut their lunch? (It's a bit hard to gauge the
trend from outside the US, as Jolt is particularly US-focused afaict.)

Anyway, IDEA is always putting developer experience first, so it's well-
deserved.

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steeve
I use it everyday! Well deserved!

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msluyter
Intellij makes java much easier to bear for me. The one thing I miss is a
single key combination to select a line and then select subsequent lines when
pressed again (like cmd-L in Sublime). The intellij alternatives seem awkward
to me.

~~~
henrik_w
Syntax aware selection (Ctrl-W) doesn't work for you? I know it's not exactly
what you ask for, but I think it's great. It successively selects a bigger and
bigger block of code. According to Productivity Guide, it's the feature I use
the most in IntelliJ (by a wide margin).

~~~
TylerE
You just seriously rocked my world. I had NO idea that feature existed.

~~~
jasonlotito
Keep in mind adding Shift to the keyboard combination reverses the selection.

Edit: Reverses, in it selects smaller portions of text, again, based on
syntax.

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olive_
It was hard to adapt after using eclipse for years, but i did not regret it.

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Yhippa
I got this during the "end of the world" sale last year and I love it. Well
deserved. I'm hoping this will be the closest thing we'll get to Visual Studio
for Java.

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stoolpigeon
I just scrolled through the comments and they are almost universally positive.

Are any of you running it on 64 bit linux and if so - have you found a way to
fix the way fonts look?

~~~
geoka9
Hi,

I do when I browse Java and Scala code.

I'm not sure what problem you mean, but I have to run `wmname LG3D` before
running idea, otherwise the fonts are not displayed at all.

With that, it runs fine; the only (minor) problem is that switching to another
window and back to idea makes the cursor disappear and some point-related
shortcuts stop working until I open any menu/window within idea.

I use a tiling window manager; I wonder if it claches with the Java UI library
somehow.

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facboy
i love intellij but i've been disappointed with the bugginess of 12. i am
(unwisely) doing a fair bit of JPA/Hibernate work at the moment and in the
latest point release they've managed to break this functionality completely.

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sparx
best java ide ever

