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IntelliJ IDEA 12 Released

136 points| ConstantineXVI | 13 years ago |blogs.jetbrains.com | reply

121 comments

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[+] famousactress|13 years ago|reply
A lot of people find a dark look and feel much less distracting. Now that we’ve added it, you can focus more on the code and less on the IDE.

(Above screenshot: http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/d... )

I can't tell if we're being punk'd. I'm expected to take that screenshot as an example of a less distracting user interface for creative work? My condolences to anyone using the presumably more distracting previous version.

[+] manojlds|13 years ago|reply
I think the aim was to show how the dark look looked across various windows and panes.
[+] chillax|13 years ago|reply
Here's a bit less cluttered one..

http://imgur.com/rhZQZ

With the search for class/file/symbol navigation it is usually possible to live in this mode most part of the day :-)

[+] JonAtkinson|13 years ago|reply
I use PyCharm (which is essentially the same product). I love the IDE features, and it's possible to build a far less cluttered workspace. Screenshot:

http://i.imgur.com/C6Uq6.png

[+] adolfojp|13 years ago|reply
As a person who suffers from black floaters in his eyes the black UI elements are always welcome. The elements by themselves might not be less distracting but they make my floaters a lot less distracting.
[+] eropple|13 years ago|reply
That's a debugging view on a really small window. The bottom panes only show up while you're debugging and the left pane is your project browser, which you can show or hide with Ctrl-1 or Cmd-1 depending on your OS.

I use it at 1680x1050 on my rMBP and it's fantastic.

[+] epidemian|13 years ago|reply
The screenshot shows a debugging session. Both the debugging panel at the bottom and the project panel at the left can be collapsed. So it's not that bad.

But in general, yes, i agree in that Intellij IDEA's interface is quite overloaded. I haven't tried any language-specific version of the IDE, like PhpStorm or PyCharm; maybe those are less loaded, IDK.

[+] cgh|13 years ago|reply
I honestly can't understand why anyone would use Eclipse when the community version of IDEA exists, but hey.
[+] SCdF|13 years ago|reply
I honestly can't understand why people love IDEA so much. I know lots of people who swear by it, but absolutely none of them can articulate why.

Often they say Eclipse sucks, which is completely ignoring the question, and usually doesn't come with any substantial explanation of the supposed suckage. Moreover, talking about how one thing sucks and then silently comparing it to something else implies the other thing has no flaws, which is clearly unfair and stupid.

The only positive non-eclipse-hating arguments I've heard is that it's "easy to use" or "slick", both of which aren't useful to me since I'm familiar and comfortable with Eclipse's user experience. The rare time a feature is mentioned it's something Eclipse has as well.

I've tried to learn it a few times but since no one has been able to articulate any good reason to use it past a kind of anti-eclipse zealotry I haven't spent more than a few hours on it.

I'm not saying it's stupid to like IDEA, I'm saying that I think that preference in this case comes down to wishy washy things like 'feel', which is entirely subjective and entirely inarguable.

I will say this, I've heard plenty of IDEA users be snarky and condescending to people who use Eclipse (I've recently changed jobs and now work in a place seething with them), and I've not once seen it the other way. Anicdata I know, but that is life.

[+] ngd|13 years ago|reply
One thing I miss from Eclipse, for Java development, is the ability to run unit tests (or a whole program for that matter) while compilation errors exist in the code. Intellij forces me to make all my code compile before I can try out anything - I believe I do less iterative development and make less exploratory changes to code when using Intellij because of this. I've found I can live with it, and do, because my team uses Intellij, but I sure do miss executing code that won't compile.

If you have never seen this feature of Eclipse, I encourage you to try it.

[+] konradb|13 years ago|reply
A few years back I started doing work for a company where Eclipse was the standard (familiar huh!). I spent six weeks feeling like I was an unproductive failure until I gave up and unilaterally decided that I had to go back to Intellij otherwise I'd go insane. I really tried. It didn't seem to be built to work in the same way my brain did.

I bet it has improved loads since I last used it, and hopefully my brain would deal with it better, but I live in fear of ending up in a situation where it is mandatory to use it and I had to take the job for financial reasons. Well, living in fear is an overstatement. I'm sure I'd learn, with a kind of weary resignation and resentment.

Has anyone been put in such a position? The only times I've since been put in a place with loads of Eclipse where you have to use locked down client machines such as financial institutions, I've just said, I need Intellij, and it has been fine, thankfully.

[+] shortlived|13 years ago|reply

    Structural search & replace
That one is pretty important for me.

In general, Eclipse works pretty good. And it looks incredible when compare to NetBeans and other free IDEs.

[+] coliveira|13 years ago|reply
I have used both IDEA and Eclipse recently. My opinion is that IDEA has very interesting tools, but when viewed as a complete platform Eclipse deliver the best experience. There are some things that IDEA does better than anyone else, but the editor itself is mediocre. For example, the UI is too complicated, and the tabs are terrible to use. The number of plugins is also much smaller than available for Eclipse.

If you are happy with what IDEA delivers out of the box, then it is probably the best for you. Otherwise, I would should just stick to Eclipse because it offers better options in general.

[+] tieTYT|13 years ago|reply
I use IDEA and not eclipse, but for the last 2 versions of IDEA it seems to get more and more buggy and feature wise, eclipse seems exactly the same.

Then of course there's the obvious reason that with the community edition there's no appserver support. Eclipse has that.

At this point I'd use eclipse if I was familiar with it. I'm just too used to the key mappings of IDEA to deal with the switch over.

[+] _casperc|13 years ago|reply
I use Eclipse simply because it allows me to have multiple projects open in the same workspace and search for files/classes across all projects. When Idea gets that feature I'll probably take another look at it.
[+] mynameishere|13 years ago|reply
I've used it and couldn't figure out the allegedly big advantage.
[+] nickmain|13 years ago|reply
Some of the plugins I would need (e.g. Haxe support) require the premium version.
[+] taligent|13 years ago|reply
Why I use Eclipse ?

It has much, much better plugin support e.g. AWS, Google CodePro. If you use the slightly older version then it is an order of magnitude faster than IntelliJ and generally works much nicer on OSX. It is also less cluttered meaning more room for code for those on laptops.

Also IntelliJ's indexing of files on startup is completely insane. It maxes out my CPU for at a minute or so which is never good on a laptop.

IntelliJ is nice and I use it at work but it is hardly some amazing piece of engineering that its supporters love to tell me it is. In fact I have found it to be generally quite buggy.

[+] ghfghg|13 years ago|reply
Because is not much better than eclipse. In fact, it is a bit worse.
[+] flyhighplato|13 years ago|reply
I want to like IntelliJ IDEA so so much. In the same way that I want my primary computer to run Linux and all my code to be in some dialect of Lisp.
[+] rkalla|13 years ago|reply
Same thoughts here... been trying to move exclusively over to IJ since 4.x series but two (really dumb) things send me back to Eclipse every time: Javadoc formatting and Web Project module support.

I mean "really dumb" in the sense that these things shouldn't be so important to me, but as someone who writes a novel's worth of documentation inside his code, subpar Javadoc formatting doubles my workload.

The project model thing is my own problem trying to mentally map the whole project/module/artifact abstraction IJ has... I don't understand it, never have, doesn't seem intuitive and mostly just frustrated me.

I think more of this has to do with the layout of the project properties dialog than anything combined with my own mental reluctance to understand what they are proposing here.

That said, the code quality of the product seems to be excellence. Very smooth, no surprise exceptions during use (Which is par for the course in Eclipse).

Some day I'll sit down and figure it out, but until then I will continue to be confused and stick to my simple, flat, POM-defined life in Eclipse and cry every time I load up 4.2 and wonder why I am doing this to myself (if you haven't used Eclipse 4.x series yet, you don't understand how much pain there is waiting for you).

[+] mahmoudimus|13 years ago|reply
I love JetBrains - those guys know how to build a product. I'm particularly interested to see how this starts to affect the other products like PyCharm, RubyMine, etc.
[+] colin_jack|13 years ago|reply
I would have said the same until I tried RubyMine last year. Slow, buggy, confusing UX...was glad to be done with it.
[+] garblegarble|13 years ago|reply
I've tried IDEA briefly a few times but what gets me is the lack of an error pane that's as compact and descriptive as the one in Eclipse - the pain of using Eclipse 4.x is tempting me to ignore that limitation, however.

Does anyone know if it's possible to get this in IDEA? http://i.stack.imgur.com/1kTPd.png

I know it's possible to get some of it with inspections but what I really want is something that combines errors+warnings together and gives me instant feedback. Am I just missing something that's really there?

[+] haakon|13 years ago|reply
A million times this. Your screenshot doesn't show it, but Eclipse's error pane shows all errors and warnings from all source files in the project. This is very useful and not possible in IDEA or NetBeans. So it's easier to overlook errors and I never have the same feeling of knowing about things that need attention in my projects.
[+] nevster|13 years ago|reply
Analayze->Inspect Code... Shows both errors and warnings
[+] tharshan09|13 years ago|reply
God i love the phpStorm IDE so much, I was a user of the text editors for a while. But the debugging support in this ide for PHP is just amazing. It integrates with mercurial nicely too. The recent black color scheme is just a nice surprise. Well worth the price.
[+] epidemian|13 years ago|reply
I've been using the Android UI editor in IDEA 12 EAP for quite some time and it's been really pleasing to use, especially for a first release of such a complicated component.

[OT] It is, however, very stupid and frustrating that an IDE has to recreate all the Android drawing and layout engine just to show a static view of what your screen will end up looking like. Compared to the experience of web development where you can edit the living DOM model and see the changes in real time because there's no difference between coding time and running time, the Android UI experience feels very arcane :(

[+] manish_gill|13 years ago|reply
I wish the Community edition would support the Python plugin. Currently, if you want to develop in Python, you can't use the Community edition. :(
[+] Roybatty|13 years ago|reply
And if every plugin was supported in the community edition, they would be out of business.
[+] chillax|13 years ago|reply
The new compiler mode is very good. Non-intrusive and it really speeds up things, especially on a non-ssd-disk.
[+] cgh|13 years ago|reply
Since you have obviously used the new version, can you comment on how compatible it is with projects created in v.11? Do we have to recreate the entire project, or will it import them as-is?
[+] tuananh|13 years ago|reply
AppCode EAP got dark theme too if you're an Obj-C kind-of-guy
[+] manishsharan|13 years ago|reply
Could someone please comment support for Clojure ? The last time I tried , I did not find La Clojure to be any better than Eclipse + counterclockwise .
[+] sigzero|13 years ago|reply
They launched a new website look too.
[+] sparx|13 years ago|reply
great ui, super fast compiling, indexing, best java ide ever
[+] martinced|13 years ago|reply
No harmt meant but I'm SCJP since more than 10 years and have been both a long time IntelliJ (still have IntelliJ version 4 installation files backups on CDs, found them yesterday) and a long time Eclipse user and I'm now using Emacs.

I know, I know: Spring, refactoring, ORM + XML hell and whatnots for hundreds of K's codebase of 'enterprisey' stuff doing really not much...

But as a now long-time Emacs user (since a few years) watching IntelliJ vs Eclipse fight looks a bit like like Lada vs Yugo car owners fighting about who has the best car ; )

[+] Roybatty|13 years ago|reply
Whatever floats your boat. I bet you would be happy using notepad to write Java too. Eclipse might be Yugo, but using Emacs to write Java is like using Fred Flinstone's car. Hope you got thick callouses ;)