
IntelliJ IDEA 12 Released - ConstantineXVI
http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2012/12/intellij-idea-12-is-available-for-download/
======
famousactress
_A lot of people find a dark look and feel much less distracting. Now that
we’ve added it, you can focus more on the code and less on the IDE._

(Above screenshot: [http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/wp-
content/uploads/2012/12/d...](http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/wp-
content/uploads/2012/12/darcula-1.png) )

I can't tell if we're being punk'd. I'm expected to take that screenshot as an
example of a _less_ distracting user interface for creative work? My
condolences to anyone using the presumably _more_ distracting previous
version.

~~~
JonAtkinson
I use PyCharm (which is essentially the same product). I love the IDE
features, and it's possible to build a far less cluttered workspace.
Screenshot:

<http://i.imgur.com/C6Uq6.png>

~~~
sahat
How do you hide the top toolbar completely? (<http://i.imgur.com/rhZQZ.png>)

~~~
JonAtkinson
There is an option to toggle the toolbar in the menu: View > Toolbar

~~~
sahat
It has already been unchecked. But then I found View > Navigation Bar. That's
exactly what I was looking for.

------
cgh
I honestly can't understand why anyone would use Eclipse when the community
version of IDEA exists, but hey.

~~~
SCdF
I honestly can't understand why people love IDEA so much. I know lots of
people who swear by it, but absolutely none of them can articulate why.

Often they say Eclipse sucks, which is completely ignoring the question, and
usually doesn't come with any substantial explanation of the supposed suckage.
Moreover, talking about how one thing sucks and then silently comparing it to
something else implies the other thing has no flaws, which is clearly unfair
and stupid.

The only positive non-eclipse-hating arguments I've heard is that it's "easy
to use" or "slick", both of which aren't useful to me since I'm familiar and
comfortable with Eclipse's user experience. The rare time a feature is
mentioned it's something Eclipse has as well.

I've tried to learn it a few times but since no one has been able to
articulate any good reason to use it past a kind of anti-eclipse zealotry I
haven't spent more than a few hours on it.

I'm not saying it's stupid to like IDEA, I'm saying that I think that
preference in this case comes down to wishy washy things like 'feel', which is
entirely subjective and entirely inarguable.

I will say this, I've heard plenty of IDEA users be snarky and condescending
to people who use Eclipse (I've recently changed jobs and now work in a place
seething with them), and I've not once seen it the other way. Anicdata I know,
but that is life.

~~~
elehack
Ridiculous attention to detail. It isn't the big things, mostly, that draw me
to IDEA (though some of them, like the way it handles projects and that Maven
Just Works, help a lot), but the thousand little things that someone,
somewhere, got right that you don't think about. Unless I think about it, I
just notice that the overall experience is somehow more pleasant.

Stuff like what comes first in autocomplete (Eclipse's quality in this regard
has been somewhat inconsistent). Refactor suggesting intelligent names for
variables based on their types.

And then there's the theming. Normally, Swing apps are somewhat ugly and
generally obnoxious. The JetBrains folks have put together a Swing LaF that's
beautiful and compact, which also contributes to the overall experience just
being pleasant.

I'm happier using IntelliJ.

~~~
vetinari
Well, it is a Swing app and Swing apps on Linux look atrocious. Especially the
font rendering looks like taken from Linux distributions from 10 years ago.

When you see this on the first run, it kind of successfully undermines the
argument about ridiculous attention to detail. I know that Swing is not under
JetBrains' control, but Eclipse looks fine.

~~~
Flow
I don't use Linux, but IntelliJ uses native font rendering in Linux according
to their blog. Give it a try.

~~~
vamega
Can you point me to where on their blog they mention they're using native font
rendering?

<http://stackoverflow.com/a/12976496> shows me that they aren't using native
font rendering.

~~~
Flow
Hmm, I don't use Linux myself so I can't really be 100% sure. But I found the
info here. Maybe they don't mean "platform rendering engine" when they say
"system fonts"?

[http://blog.jetbrains.com/webide/2012/10/phpstorm-
webstorm-5...](http://blog.jetbrains.com/webide/2012/10/phpstorm-
webstorm-5-0-2-released/)

------
flyhighplato
I want to like IntelliJ IDEA so so much. In the same way that I want my
primary computer to run Linux and all my code to be in some dialect of Lisp.

~~~
rkalla
Same thoughts here... been trying to move exclusively over to IJ since 4.x
series but two (really dumb) things send me back to Eclipse every time:
Javadoc formatting and Web Project module support.

I mean "really dumb" in the sense that these things shouldn't be so important
to me, but as someone who writes a novel's worth of documentation inside his
code, subpar Javadoc formatting doubles my workload.

The project model thing is my own problem trying to mentally map the whole
project/module/artifact abstraction IJ has... I don't understand it, never
have, doesn't seem intuitive and mostly just frustrated me.

I think more of this has to do with the layout of the project properties
dialog than anything combined with my own mental reluctance to understand what
they are proposing here.

That said, the code quality of the product seems to be excellence. Very
smooth, no surprise exceptions during use (Which is par for the course in
Eclipse).

Some day I'll sit down and figure it out, but until then I will continue to be
confused and stick to my simple, flat, POM-defined life in Eclipse and cry
every time I load up 4.2 and wonder why I am doing this to myself (if you
haven't used Eclipse 4.x series yet, you don't understand how much pain there
is waiting for you).

~~~
white_devil
> if you haven't used Eclipse 4.x series yet, you don't understand how much
> pain there is waiting for you

Wow. I thought Eclipse would have gotten better along the years. Back when I
switched to IDEA at version 4.x, the difference between them was like night
and day - IDEA was _so_ much better.

Could you tell me a bit about the pain of Eclipse? It's quite surprising if
they haven't managed to produce a solid IDE yet.

I agree that IDEA's way of organizing things is kind of clunky. In a way, a
"project" can be thought of as "metadata about stuff I'm working on", instead
of the more intuitive "a project is a directory on my hard drive".

Once you set up a project, you can then bring stuff into it with "modules".
For example, you may want to include source code trees and/or JARs from
multiple locations.

~~~
rkalla
\-- CAUTION: Serious rambling ahead... --

Eclipse is the non-commercial result of a committee of developers so wide and
uninvolved in each other's greater visions and monetization strategies, that
the user-experience of the base platform is "functional" at best.

I can cope with just "functional" (and stable) but Eclipse is "functional"
only -- the core platform (UI, plugin framework, all core Java/source tools,
etc.) are really stable and robust.

Everything else built ontop of them (custom editors/designers, Web tools, all
of WTP, Maven tooling) basically all the ++ resources are unbelievably memory
hungry (turn on the heap monitor and watch it when you run the Update Manager
> Check for Updates... seriously, just watch how many objects are instantiated
and GC'ed in that simple cycle, 100s of MBs) and generally broken.

To that point, the "design by committee" environment leads to overengineering
that you cannot fully appreciate until you start trying to build ontop of
those APIs. If you hate yourself, try and build something ontop of WTP from
scratch (like custom tech support, like a Play IDE).

Also interacting with the Update Manager concept that has tried to become so
much more but has been hammered into this "jack of everything-even-stuff-no-
one-needs, master of nothing especially the thing it is suppose to do"

The intelligence needed to correctly calculate an update plan based on plugin
versions and interdependencies is worthy of a PHD -- if you've used Eclipse
for an extended period of time and upgraded yourself into a corner that the
Update Mangaer cannot update you out of, then you know what I mean. If you are
a long-time user you've heard "Try a new workspace" or "Do a new install" more
times than you can count as far as trouble shooting first-steps.

Eclipse is an odd ecosystem. The only money to make by EVERY company involved
is in +1 features that have not been commoditized by the platform.

Unfortunately these are ALL the developers contributing to the core platform,
the same ones trying to keep their pay checks by developing tools ontop of the
core. There is no desire to cannibalize their own products and markets by
contributing that stuff unless they absolutely have to (for fame or strategic
reasons, take your pick).

The move to 4.x was a total redesign of the platform to make it "Web friendly"
I think, I have no idea... but it was a major-major overhaul of the core
platform and the result is a buggy/slow/mess even at the core level that has
long since stabilized.

Anything beyond "core tooling" available in the open-source bundle is going to
be what I would consider a "best intention" implementation. Not good enough to
put anything commercial out of business and not bad enough to be berated or
ignored completely... just bad enough to make you crazy with rage if you
depend on it day in and day out, but good enough to seem cool if you are doing
a tool evaluation. That said the stuff that gets used by EVERYONE (e.g. Java
code tools) is great because it is in every contributor's best interest to
have that stuff rock (their day jobs). For the tooling that is very specific
to a team or company, definitely not the case.

IJ on the other hand is a single product backed by a single company with the
sole focus of being as-good-as-it-needs-to-stay-commercially-competitive.
JetBrains has to spend money to convince people to spend THEIR money... the
market is forcing this product to get better and better and those developers
appreciate things like rewriting a plugin framework to keep it fast, rewriting
the code-completion parser to update faster, etc... the kind of stuff that is
huge technical debt after 8 years that an OS project can almost never justify
sticking on someone's bottom line to rewrite.

That said, I actually dislike some of the core project paradigms used in IJ
which is the only reason I don't swear by it heart-and-soul. The dev
experience is much more stable, performant and consistent.

If you want a corollary of what I mean about "paradigms" consider the IJ UI
builder compared to the NetBeans one -- NetBeans when NaturalLayout came out
was all about "Drag and drop with snap-to rules" -- it was intuitive as all
hell.

IJ on the other hand was all about FormLayout-like behavior and a way more
technical experience with weighting and splits and bindings.

Both were pretty stable and worked great, but took very different approaches.
If you bought into the IJ model it was awesome and you had a great time using
it.

If you were like me and wanted the preferred-spacing snap-tos guiding your
design, it was a pain and you much preferred the NetBeans UI designer.

So if you are doing core Java dev work, Eclipse and IJ are both awesome. If
you are doing Web Dev/Spring/JavaEE/JSF work -- try them both, the bugs in
Eclipse will eventually drive you crazy I imagine though and I am NOT saying
IJ is better, it is different, and in some design/paradigm ways less intuitive
in my opinion which is what keeps me from just recommending it to everyone I
meet on the street.

NetBeans falls somewhere in here... I think in a lot of ways it is an unsung
hero, has some nice polish that the others don't, very human friendly but is
also missing some hard-core functionality that you find after about a month of
use in my experience. Back in the day the real-time compile and auto-complete
speed of Eclipse kept me away from NetBeans. The "based on Ant/maven" building
design was a decent call I think, I get why they made it when they did, but it
did cost them some things.

The NB team has shored up the editors quite a bit so I think most is caught
now during editing. I am meaning to try the 7.2 beta so maybe I'll be happily
surprised.

I haven't used the last 2 versions of NetBeans though -- the Javadoc
formatting always moved me away from that one as well.

What a silly reason, I know -- should stop writing so many comments :)

~~~
thebluesky
Your description of Eclipse hits the nail on the head. +1 For the comment on
updating yourself into a corner. Eclipse plugins make it insanely easy to
shoot yourself in the foot and get the IDE into an unusable state. Eclipse has
an amazing variety of plugins, but sadly 99.9% of eclipse plugins give the
other 0.1% a bad name.

From what I've seen many folks have started using IntelliJ due to the top-
notch Scala plugin which Jetbrains provides for free.

------
mahmoudimus
I love JetBrains - those guys know how to build a product. I'm particularly
interested to see how this starts to affect the other products like PyCharm,
RubyMine, etc.

~~~
JonAtkinson
As far as I can tell, the changes from IDEA 12 are already making their way
into the EAP builds of the subordinate IDEs. Certainly it seemed that way from
the most recent PyCharm EAP announcement:

[http://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2012/12/pycharm-2-7-eap-
bu...](http://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2012/12/pycharm-2-7-eap-
build-124-138/)

------
garblegarble
I've tried IDEA briefly a few times but what gets me is the lack of an error
pane that's as compact and descriptive as the one in Eclipse - the pain of
using Eclipse 4.x is tempting me to ignore that limitation, however.

Does anyone know if it's possible to get this in IDEA?
<http://i.stack.imgur.com/1kTPd.png>

I know it's possible to get some of it with inspections but what I really want
is something that combines errors+warnings together and gives me instant
feedback. Am I just missing something that's really there?

~~~
haakon
A million times this. Your screenshot doesn't show it, but Eclipse's error
pane shows all errors and warnings from _all_ source files in the project.
This is very useful and not possible in IDEA or NetBeans. So it's easier to
overlook errors and I never have the same feeling of knowing about things that
need attention in my projects.

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tharshan09
God i love the phpStorm IDE so much, I was a user of the text editors for a
while. But the debugging support in this ide for PHP is just amazing. It
integrates with mercurial nicely too. The recent black color scheme is just a
nice surprise. Well worth the price.

------
epidemian
I've been using the Android UI editor in IDEA 12 EAP for quite some time and
it's been really pleasing to use, _especially_ for a first release of such a
complicated component.

[OT] It is, however, very stupid and frustrating that an IDE has to recreate
all the Android drawing and layout engine just to show a static view of what
your screen will end up looking like. Compared to the experience of web
development where you can edit the living DOM model and see the changes in
real time because there's no difference between coding time and running time,
the Android UI experience feels very arcane :(

------
manish_gill
I wish the Community edition would support the Python plugin. Currently, if
you want to develop in Python, you can't use the Community edition. :(

~~~
Roybatty
And if every plugin was supported in the community edition, they would be out
of business.

------
chillax
The new compiler mode is very good. Non-intrusive and it really speeds up
things, especially on a non-ssd-disk.

~~~
cgh
Since you have obviously used the new version, can you comment on how
compatible it is with projects created in v.11? Do we have to recreate the
entire project, or will it import them as-is?

~~~
mmorett
I was able to use it at the same time I had IDEA 11 up with both using the
same project. It was interesting. Every time I'd switch to the other IDE
window, each one detected some changes to the project structure and wanted to
reload it.

Otherwise, it was very transparent. No pain at all.

------
Flow
How to make IntelliJ/WebStorm et al look less cluttered:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEwjDeof1ak&feature=youtu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEwjDeof1ak&feature=youtu.be&hd=1)

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tuananh
AppCode EAP got dark theme too if you're an Obj-C kind-of-guy

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manishsharan
Could someone please comment support for Clojure ? The last time I tried , I
did not find La Clojure to be any better than Eclipse + counterclockwise .

------
Cieplak
my ideal java ide:

[http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/img/screen-java-
dark.pn...](http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/img/screen-java-dark.png)

~~~
c4n4rd
Could you share your color schema info?

Thanks

~~~
ptomato
<http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized>

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sigzero
They launched a new website look too.

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sparx
great ui, super fast compiling, indexing, best java ide ever

------
martinced
No harmt meant but I'm SCJP since more than 10 years and have been both a long
time IntelliJ (still have IntelliJ version 4 installation files backups on
CDs, found them yesterday) and a long time Eclipse user and I'm now using
Emacs.

I know, I know: Spring, refactoring, ORM + XML hell and whatnots for hundreds
of K's codebase of 'enterprisey' stuff doing really not much...

But as a now long-time Emacs user (since a few years) watching IntelliJ vs
Eclipse fight looks a bit like like Lada vs Yugo car owners fighting about who
has the best car ; )

~~~
Roybatty
Whatever floats your boat. I bet you would be happy using notepad to write
Java too. Eclipse might be Yugo, but using Emacs to write Java is like using
Fred Flinstone's car. Hope you got thick callouses ;)

------
wildranter
Looks nice, but... Is it any faster on Mac?

~~~
yrral
Yes! The compiler now runs in a different process from the main IDE. This
actually makes a huge difference. Interacting with the editor is now instant,
projects compile faster, and the IDE uses less memory. For more details:
[http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2012/06/brand-new-
compiler-m...](http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2012/06/brand-new-compiler-
mode-in-intellij-idea-12-leda/)

~~~
wildranter
Great! That's just what I was looking for to try again this awesome IDE.
Thanks for the input!

