About a year with eclipse and nearly two with IDEA now.
In terms of overall usability, speed, and stability IDEA is incomparably better. Yes, there are a few minor things that eclipse does better/IDEA can't do (so I keep reading). But this is hugely overshadowed by the fact that IDEA is a high-quality, well-supported professional-feeling product. In comparison, eclipse looks, smells, and acts like a kludgy, bloated, long-lived open source project.
The main important difference is that eclipse is free, and thus some folks seem to really go to bat defending it. There is a certain powerful frugality ethic among developers.
But really, if you're not going to get bent out of shape about spending a few bucks for a piece of software you spend many of your waking hours using, there is no serious comparison.
>IDEA is a high-quality, well-supported professional-feeling product. In comparison, eclipse looks, smells, and acts like a kludgy, bloated, long-lived open source project.
This times a million.
Though I do love open source both in principle and in many products, certain proprietary software tools are entirely worth paying for due to how much more productive they make you. IDEA is my prototypical example.
> IDEA is a high-quality, well-supported professional-feeling product. In comparison, eclipse looks, smells, and acts like a kludgy, bloated, long-lived open source project.
Proprietary, closed source development vs. Open Source software development in a nutshell.
I'm really glad a friend recommended IntelliJ IDEA to me. It's a great product. Having used both Netbeans and Eclipse on a rather powerful machine, the UI would lag. I don't like to wait for computers to finish computing things when I'm programming pretty much in just a text editor ("writing code mode")...which brings up another point - Atom is not a great text editor either because it is so UI laggy it slows down development.
In terms of overall usability, speed, and stability IDEA is incomparably better. Yes, there are a few minor things that eclipse does better/IDEA can't do (so I keep reading). But this is hugely overshadowed by the fact that IDEA is a high-quality, well-supported professional-feeling product. In comparison, eclipse looks, smells, and acts like a kludgy, bloated, long-lived open source project.
The main important difference is that eclipse is free, and thus some folks seem to really go to bat defending it. There is a certain powerful frugality ethic among developers.
But really, if you're not going to get bent out of shape about spending a few bucks for a piece of software you spend many of your waking hours using, there is no serious comparison.