JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

Yesterday, sorry to say but still off by magnitudes. These things are measured in ms on the eclipse side and in whole seconds on the Intellij side. On a good day it's less than 5 seconds in Intellij. I developed in Eclipse before I switched a few years ago and while it was a bit finicky with gradle, maven support was pretty solid. I never had issues where Eclipse compilation state was wrong for more than a few hundred ms. Basically if it says it compiles it means it compiled without errors, class files exist and when you run something it jumps straight to forking the process with no delay. In Intellij, it takes seconds at best; sometimes closer to 30-60 seconds.

Given that performance is a recurring topic in the Intellij release notes I conclude that they know they still have issues there and they are slowly looking for ways to make things faster. This is not a solved problem.

Part of this is the Kotlin compiler; part of this is indexing; part of this is simply caching logic.

I recently worked on the Elasticsearch code base in intellij. Fast is not a word I would use to describe that. It's a big code base and it clearly was struggling with it. I know some Elastic developers that still use Eclipse basically for this reason.

Well on the face of it, it's a simple tool isn't it? It's a spinning saw blade, and surface(s) against which to rest the wood being cut.

And I've never used one, but I'm sure it takes some learning, skill, and practice to get good cuts the way you need them, e.g. bang on 45deg all the way across for a 'mitred' corner joint. And it certainly needs learning, care, and attention to operate safely.

I don't mean it to be an insensitive analogy - accidents involving table saws are obviously horrendously worse than those involving git.

Vim was never about typing efficiency. However, it is indeed the best way to navigate and edit text. This statement is very subjective because, just like any tool, it depends on the user. Chainsaw looks ugly, heavy, cumbersome and dangerous to someone who doesn't know how to use it. But with some practice it becomes an incredibly efficient tool. People make ice sculptures using chainsaws.

And I'm not talking about Vim the editor. I'm talking about Vim as an idea. Which is today implemented for pretty much every single [popular] editor and IDE in use. That fact alone is pretty illustrative of awesomeness of the idea of Vim.

And the comment about Emacs is quite disingenuous. I have never been inside a Formula One cockpit, but I can totally get "the job done" with my Camry, because it is totally more efficient for parallel parking.

I have used many IDEs, including InteliJ (which I used for about seven years). Emacs wins solely by its extensibility, no editor/IDE has ever matched its capabilities. For some people that is not an important factor, just like the efficient parallel parking might not be important for Formula One pilots. But when you can automate pretty much anything it feels very empowering and liberating.

Small example: when I'm about the create a new commit, an emacs-lisp script can figure out the current ticket I'm working on (based on currently clocked Org-mode task), generate a branch name based on the ticket description, generate part of the commit message (in the way that it is in compliance with git tool like gommit), I would just have to type the rest of the message.

That is not only more efficient, but also reduces frustration. Compare that with the workflow in any other editor and IDE - most of these steps will have to be manual. Then someone might say: oh there's actually a plugin for Editor X that does some of that stuff for Jira. But what if I join a different company that uses Pivotal Tracker instead? I can extend my emacs-lisp script. Whereas if that's an InteliJ plugin I would either have to go through daunting process of forking and modifying the plugin or submit a feature request and wait for something that may never happen.

What's the point of tribalism? It's a natural human tendency to be protective of what's close to your heart and reject things you're unfamiliar with.

Every single HN post about either Emacs, IntelliJ, Vim, VSCode, or Atom always gets riddled with disingenuous comments of people who liked one thing more than other things. Things they either haven't tried or had some cursory experience with them.

These tools are very individual [just like toothbrushes], for someone Emacs offers something that IntelliJ or VSCode can't, for others - nothing is better than Vim.

To truly achieve mastery, one has to try and learn them all and choose a tool that works well for the situation or the one they like (for objective and subjective reasons). Some might say: "that's a waste of time", try saying that to musicians. Go tell James Hetfield of Metallica that he shouldn't be trying all sorts of different guitars because Gibson is hands-down the best.

You're not just wrong, you're also rude, which is a sign of immaturity. Professionals try to avoid that kind of language.

If you never learned Vim to the sufficient level, you will never understand how incredibly empowering and powerful it is for navigating and editing text. And that IdeaVim is hopelessly lacking many of its features.

And if you never gotten in Emacs to the point of writing your own Emacs-lisp packages you will never learn true level of extensibility capabilities of Emacs. There's simply no other tool in existence that lets you do some borderline batshit crazy stuff.

When you don't know what you're talking about, at least have some respect for those who do. I personally used your beloved tools for about seven years (to the degree of above advanced level). I switched to Emacs (with Evil-mode), because I felt that I grew out of IntelliJ. Tell me about maturity.