The first thing I’ve found that I love in IntelliJ
Day two with IntelliJ IDEA was more productive than one, having gotten used to it a little more. I have also found the one thing that I really like so far and that is I can tell it to execute and Ant target as part of an Ant configuration.
At work this is wonderful as we are using iBatis and our Ant script copies the iBatis config files to different directories so that unit tests and the web app can load them via their respective classpaths. In Eclipse this was a pain because if you changed a config and didn’t have it moved to the appropriate place you didn’t get expected results.
Now, some might say just run everything via Ant, and we can do that, but for running individual test classes that is a pain. Is it a feature worth $250? Hmmm… maybe…
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My favourite feature is the fully customizable shortcut mappings. You spend some time configuring short cuts to point to external scripts and custom tasks, ant tasks. And then from then on I can almost do without a mouse. The productivity is incredible. Something eclipse is lagging.
It makes using eclipse feel like playing warcraft without using shortcuts.
Try spending a day on the shortcuts customization. Try assigning short cuts to your clean, compile, deployment, run test tasks, ant tasks or maven tasks or external script tasks. Think of anything you need to do with a mouse and try to replace it with a shortcut….yes you can do that in IntelliJ. Then go mouseless (less navigating the code). Once you are setup … watch your productivity soar.
Think playing warcraft without using shortcuts and flipping thru commands in the menu.
I can’t do such extreme short cut customizations on eclipse after so many years. since I was forced on eclipse by my company. It doesn’t seem like much, but its the thing i will pay the $250 for….maybe the 10X better code refactoring and inspection out of the box (Its also better than any eclipse plugins i can find).
Feature by Feature you will find that most of the features in Intellij is present in Eclipse. However this has nothing to do with why people are zealots when they are willing to pay 250 for IJ. Just as you noticed this simple functionality really makes your job easier. Compared to eclipse, this is what stands out. The guys over at Jetbrains really think like programmers. They pay attention to the little details that makes it “better” for the IJ guys. Refactoring in JSP, HTML,XML, JAVA, Javascript, now Groovy, Ruby, is so integrated into the tool. Here is something I have used to illustrate to other Eclipse, MyEclipse users. I import a project primarily implemented in Eclipse and I run the code coverage feature n IJ and I tend to find a lot of “basic” errors, in the code. For example potential infinite loops. This is so integrated in the tool that any developer will notice it and make changes while editing, no need to run CheckStyle or PMD, it’s helping the developer along the way to maintian a level of quality. Keep an eye on the errors and warnings and the light bulb