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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

IntelliJ Idea is head and shoulders better than many other IDEs, particularly Eclipse in the reliability department.

Many of their products are. I'm constantly amazed at how well PyCharm is developed, just yesterday saw how well they support git submodules for projects and synchronous commits.

I'm not a big fan of IDEs, but IntelliJ is really good. I just hate how heavy it is.

Use eclipse for a while, you won't think intellij is heavy anymore after that.

Ha, I just had this experience recently. It's amazing how quickly I got fed up with Eclipse, and how much it made me appreciate IntelliJ after I switched.

I second you on that. I only started using IntelliJ when I started heavy Java development. IntelliJ and its sister tools are a great help if you don't have the time to get into the nuances of whatever language you're using.

Care to give some examples how? For me, Eclipse has remained very stable. Maybe we are using them for different languages and/or things.

I worked with Eclipse for a few years and found it was a constant source of stress, refusing to stay synchronized with maven, crashing, having to restart it, etc.

TL;DR +1 for IntelliJ

I was hating maven, until I started using IntelliJ. I don't remember ever Eclipse going to zero error count on a maven project whereas the project would just compile if maven was used outside of Eclipse.

IntelliJ just works. FTW it has Eclipse key-mappings as well.

"A UI error has occurred trying to display a UI error" or something equally unhelpful.

When eclipse gave me that error message I immediately wrote it off as useful software.

Also it is dog slow compared to intellij

When I used it for Java, I often would have to use the menu option to restart. Seriously .. a menu option to restart???

The stability wasn't as bad as the slowness. Also, OSGI seems to be a philosophy or cult. Things are just generally complex and bloated.

Android Studio, based closely on IntelliJ, has this menu item on the OSX version:

File | Invalidate Caches / Restart ...

IntelliJ lets you do a lot more from the keyboard. It's suggestions for code completion are very useful. It's amazing to see the code almost writing itself, several times faster than you can type!

It even has a plugin that will tell you the key commands for any feature you use more than 3 times.

Oh! Link please?

i think its called 'key promoter'

I had some issues when I used eclipse, especially back in 2009 when I was forced to use perforce.

It is nice but I don't think I would call it reliable. There are crashes, it took quite some time for stuff like column editing to stop corrupting the files etc. I think they are even less stable than a recent Visual Studio (ah the good stable days of 2008 are long gone)

I wound up using java for a couple of courses at uni... mainly for the networking library. I used to just compile it via the command line because Netbeans and Eclipse pissed me off too much.

I was never much of an IDE guy but I've been using and seriously enjoying PHPStorm and RubyMine lately.

it has plenty of warts, it's great but I wouldn't say it's reliable.

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