Back when I was working on Google's indexing system, we had a test-driven-development evangelist work with our team for a few weeks, helping get us up to speed with the latest best practices. He also kept strongly recommending we switch from Emacs/Vim to Eclipse, telling us how wonderful it was. Several of us tried it out. Our next meeting, we asked him what we were doing wrong that it took so long to start up, and was still a bit laggy for several minutes after starting up. He told us that it was re-indexing our code in the background at startup, and that we should really just start Eclipse on Monday and keep it open all week.
At my current job, I use IntelliJ off a local install, and the startup time is painful compared to Vim off a network drive, and the UI gets laggy from time to time. It has some git integration, but if I switch branches, it takes IntelliJ tens of seconds to catch up. The auto-complete is also sometimes handy, but I almost always need to add a trailing token and then go back to the token I want auto-completed to prevent auto-complete from swallowing the existing trailing token. The way I work and the way IntelliJ likes to auto-insert close-quotes, etc. quite often ends up incorrectly closing something that's already closed, assuming I'm always editing code left-to-right. Sometimes, IntelliJ also gets into a state where it seems it has hit a race condition between parsing and editing code and it thinks my code won't compile, but it in fact compiles fine and restarting IntelliJ fixes the mis-parsing.
The code indexing and auto-complete is handy, but it certainly feels like I'm both doing something wrong and have my setup a little off. The UI laginess across both Eclipse and IntelliJ across more than a decade, running from a local drive, even on a pretty beefy workstation, is easy to get used to, as long as you don't frequently switch to an editor that isn't laggy.
On the flip side, I imagine if you're very used to auto-complete, it really messes up your workflow to go without it, and even more disruptive to switch back and forth between editors with and without auto-complete.
At my current job, I use IntelliJ off a local install, and the startup time is painful compared to Vim off a network drive, and the UI gets laggy from time to time. It has some git integration, but if I switch branches, it takes IntelliJ tens of seconds to catch up. The auto-complete is also sometimes handy, but I almost always need to add a trailing token and then go back to the token I want auto-completed to prevent auto-complete from swallowing the existing trailing token. The way I work and the way IntelliJ likes to auto-insert close-quotes, etc. quite often ends up incorrectly closing something that's already closed, assuming I'm always editing code left-to-right. Sometimes, IntelliJ also gets into a state where it seems it has hit a race condition between parsing and editing code and it thinks my code won't compile, but it in fact compiles fine and restarting IntelliJ fixes the mis-parsing.
The code indexing and auto-complete is handy, but it certainly feels like I'm both doing something wrong and have my setup a little off. The UI laginess across both Eclipse and IntelliJ across more than a decade, running from a local drive, even on a pretty beefy workstation, is easy to get used to, as long as you don't frequently switch to an editor that isn't laggy.
On the flip side, I imagine if you're very used to auto-complete, it really messes up your workflow to go without it, and even more disruptive to switch back and forth between editors with and without auto-complete.