I just got an email saying there’s 20% discount for IntelliJ IDE and I’m tempted to buy it. By all means, I’ve ONLY used Eclipse and it worked out fairly well. Eclipse isn’t say IE bad but I’ve had my share of banging my heads and tearing my hair. There are few reasons I want but I’m not so sure if it’s worth $160 (renewal is $99/year).
Jetbrain (the company behind IntelliJ) is a company that focuses on IDE. It’s hard to imagine a software company that solely make profit of IDE so I imagine it really has to be good.
One of the feature they have is that ‘code analysis’ is run all the time. On eclipse, you have to run at a project level to do a ‘code analysis’. Many times, I don’t do this since it’s quite annoying.
True Auto-complete for popular JS API’s like jquery, angular, extjs, and etc…
Would you guys buy it for $160? I’m about 80% sure I’ll buy it.
Why is that? That’s what I like to know. What makes you not switch back to Eclipse? Actually, what’s the top features you use in IntelliJ that does not exists in Eclipse?
I’ve never been a fan of Eclipse. I couldn’t get used to the UI and it just didn’t function the way I work. I started off with phpStorm, fell in love, then had the need to expand to Ruby and Python, so I upgraded to IntelliJ.
In short, they put out a solid product. They really aren’t an IDE only company, they also make ReSharper, dotPeek, dotCover, and a whole slew of utilities that we use internally for our .NET development.
I simply love how the whole thing is laid out. It just fits me. From the project structure, to the menu organization, to the fact that I can pretty well customize anything and everything without breaking the IDE, it just feels solid.
IntelliJ14 added a lot of awesome support for ES6, which was desperately needed for one of the projects I play around with. The new git UIs are pretty fantastic too, as the completely overhauled them which makes them a bit easier to work with (one you figure out the UI – there should have been some help added/tooltips that we could dismiss). It’s plugin support and installation are dead simple and don’t seem to bog down the system when you add a bunch of them!
Finally, their support has been top-notch for me. The first thing I try to test, is a companies support system. JetBrains has never let me down. Once I discovered I needed an IDE with good Python and Ruby support and I just renewed my phpStorm license, they gave me a really nice discount to upgrade.
They are one product, I find myself enjoying to use versus feeling like I’m banging my head against the wall. I don’t know that I’ve had that frustration with IntelliJ yet, and I’ve put it through the paces of vagrant, xdebug, terminal, git, and so much more.
I wish they would give out free license for programmer hobbist… They do have free license for open source developers…but I’m apparently not… Most likely, I’ll swallow the pill and get this… I even checked my edu school account and they deleted it… oh well… Maybe it is worth the money
Buy it. It’s very good and definitely a world of difference from Eclipse. Eclipse is a clunky old overbloated monster with poor web support. The JavaScript support in Eclipse, even with plugins, is absolutely pathetic. Jetbrains by contrast, sells an IDE specifically for JavaScript called WebStorm, which by itself is very good and pretty popular.
Most of the other IDEs from Jetbrains are just plugins for IntelliJ. They are pretty much the only real competitor for Visual Studio in terms of quality. Neither Eclipse nor Netbeans, or any other IDE I’ve ever seen can match IntelliJ or VS.
There is a 30 day trial of the Ultimate version, so you should check that out. The free community version has quite a few less features than Ultimate and I personally don’t see why it even exists.