Why should you try IntelliJ IDEA ? (Blatant Advertising forum at Coderanch) (original) (raw)

Worth to mention, that I'm using Intellij IDEA for around 2 years now. Moved from the other well-known IDE which I used not only professionally, but also for my personal projects. I switched both.

I couldn't say the transition was difficult, actually quite an opposite experience, it was smooth, mainly I believe because of the resources provided by JetBrains. Personally myself I watched recorded sessions for tips and tricks by Hadi Hariri and learned from them a lot.

As working on a big code bases lately, the very first thing after the IntelliJ IDEA install I was looking for my TOP 1 feature in IDE - "quick search" for phrase occurrences across the project. Having this feature as a separate plugin on other IDE, I was pleasantly surprised it was a native functionality in IntelliJ, moreover, much richer and more naturally to use than I expected.

Second thing I enjoy mostly about the IntelliJ is an ability to have main editor screen without the tabs. I learned that from [url=http://hadihariri.com/2014/06/24/no-tabs-in-intellij-idea/\]Hari's blog post[/url] - that helps me to concentrate on a singular source code file at a given point in time as well as to use mouse way less than I used before as switching between the different source code files I'm able to achieve solely using shortcuts of rich navigation functionality.

Next to mention are refactoring tools. These tools are in constant use by me refining code day to day. Also I strongly position refactor suggestions by the IDE itself, starting from Java 8 I completed lots of refactoring suggestions to use functional approach along with the Stream API which I like a lot. It cuts the time significantly for the code refactoring, yet again, heavy use of shortcuts. I catch myself I barely use mouse nowadays using IntelliJ, I got an impression that whole ideology of this IDE is to drift out from the mouse use, and I quite like it.

Comparing to other IDEs, I found IntelliJ to be better integrated with version control systems, it helps me in an easy way identify which parts of the code I changed after the latest pulled version, so before I commit I can easily navigate through and revise them using provided diff tool.

The list of liked features getting long, we possibly could end up on New Year's Eve describing it all here, however, intentionally I won't mention easy debugging process where I think most of the developers supposed to spend as less as possible time at, presumably by more unit testing code - for which I usually have screen split where left part of the screen is for unit tests, while right part of the screen is for production code.

Due to the work nature I do, sometimes I have to have opened several different projects at a time, which IDE tend to handle that very well, so I can have them opened on multiple monitors.

As a slight downside, maybe I just didn’t quite figure it yet is, when the indexing of the project files kicks in, couldn’t quite predict whether opening a project would require that or not. Sometimes I get an impression that it starts for no reason, granted, it serves a good purpose in general - to provide smart completion. But as I said, it is only a slight downside, and not sure whether it happens after the latest upgrade, and even if that happens, that usually doesn’t take so long so I’d manage get bored.

If I’d need to name one of the most pleasant IDE’s to work with, IntelliJ IDEA would be my current choice.