[tkubacki]

I went from C# to JVM/gradle and have the opposite experience.

1) default C# IDE is junk compared to IntelliJ 2) Gradle give you insane level of control over project you can even build dynamic template tasks shown in IntelliJ UI using Kotlin/Groovy 3) JVM ecosystem is much bigger and default framework SpringBoot is ready to use with houndreds of integrations which are either non existent or hards to use in .NET as opposed to SpringBoot where you have batteries included approach e.g. want outbox pattern? Simply use modulith, convention over configuration will give you some nice defaults… 4) There are plenty of widely used langs compared to .NET if you don’t like modern Java (which is on the same level as C# IMHO) you have: Kotlin which is a better lang than C#, Scala, Groovy from the mainstream ones and Clojure and probably many more lesser known. 5) There is nothing as expressive as Groovy Spock for testing in .Net world.

There are issues I see but can be easy mitigated e.g. I don’t like default Java heavy ORM (especially mapping complicated two way relations) but it’s very easy to not use them and simply relay on mapping foreign key.

To sum it up I bet your issues are mostly you don’t know ecosystem well enough.

[JamesBarney]

What makes intellij so much better than visual studio or vscode?

[tkubacki]

those are two separate questions.

Compared to old VS: First and foremost: feature richness of refactorings, code inspections and plugins - basically in the IntelliJ you have everything Reharper plugin can do for .NET and probably more. Second IntelliJ can run on non-spying operating systems. Third it's much more resource friendly for bigger projects. Last but not least ItelliJ is keyboard user friendly (e.g. you can jump and resize windows using only keyboard).

Can't say much about vscode vs IntelliJ. When I tried it last time Java plugin was not there. I could not use ItelliJ keyboard shortcuts - also code formatting and refactoring options were worse than in the itelliJ. That's to be expected it's paid product after all.

[darby_nine]

vscode is basically a bunch of different tools duct taped together and, as a result, constantly breaks. It's a lot closer to being emacs than it is to being an IDE (and I say this as a fervent emacs user outside of large projects). Even with the language servers, IDE functionality is going to be playing catch-up for the next decade. Intellij definitely has a leg up there.

I've never used visual studio before so I assume the comparison is going to turn up a different set of issues. However, being tied to windows is probably not a good thing in the long term.