I made it to the top of the clicks list this week over a DZone for my post on IntelliJ winning. So, in the spirit of IDE debating, I’ll definitely keep those posts coming.
Also be sure to check out my IDE comparison page which compares things based on keyboard only usage. It’s great if you loath the mouse like I do.
Besides my reasons for loving IntelliJ with respect to the keyboard support, I have found a new reason why IntelliJ will always be a better solution and well worth the money.
They actually fix bugs. You buy the product and report a bug, they take it seriously, even if it is something somewhat minor. Here are links to two bugs I’ve filed, one for Eclipse and one for IntelliJ:
http://www.jetbrains.net/jira/browse/IDEADEV-14480?page=all
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=43625
As you can see if you look at the dates of these, the Eclipse bug, which in my opinion is pretty severe if you use the keyboard as your main form of interaction with the IDE, was opened 4 years ago. Yep. 4 YEARS! And it isn’t even closed yet!
Now if you look at the IntelliJ bug, it was opened 20 HOURS ago and is already closed and back ported! This is just one of many examples of this type of treatment. I’ve opened 10-12 bugs with Eclipse and the turn around is usually a year or two. The most shining example of this horrible lag is the “Default line terminator bug” located here:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=3970
This took five years to fix and this is one of the most fundamental settings that ALL text editors have! The ability to change the default line terminator for new files…. I mean come on people! On the flip side, IntelliJ bugs are normally fixed within a day or two and at the longest a few months.
Plus, it must really say something about the engineering of these two products to see how quickly bugs can be fixed. The better the system is engineered and tested, the easier is will be to update and fix. This might be a bit controversial, but I believe it.
So…. IntelliJ will always win until Eclipse figures out that usability and fixing bugs is far more important than adding new features.
Just found this one by accident: ALT-HOME. It pops up a small context window that allows quick navigation within the project using a horizontal tree view. Very slick and takes up very little real-estate.