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IntelliJ IDEA 14.1

blog.jetbrains.com

11–20 of 51 posts

Re: IntelliJ IDEA 14.1

#11
post #8
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree they're straight-up ugly , but they're certainly cluttered , and I think there's a very simple reason for that: IntelliJ (or VisualStudio, or Xcode, or anything in this class) is an expert tool. Expert tools can be insanely complex to use, and can have very steep learning curves, because the people who use them are willing and able to invest the time. In exchange, the tools assume that most users are going…

So there's also a mode that displays all the things that the IDE can possibly do I'm curious, how do I turn that mode on?

In IntelliJ, that'd be turning on the Toolbar, the Tool Buttons, Navigation Bar, and Status Bar, and then opening all the panels at once. In real life, I don't actually turn all those things on; I instead have common panels enabled, and then bound a shortcut to Distraction Free Mode that I use when I'm actually coding instead of debugging/building/etc. I don't remember the equivalent for Visual Studio off the top of my head, but it's similar.

Emacs and Vim don't really have a mode like that. I suppose the closest in Emacs would be just hitting M-x and then tabbing through all the functions, but I'm not sure that counts.

Re: IntelliJ IDEA 14.1

#12
post #7
post #2

I always fail to understood why these products are so ugly to see...

I disagree they're straight-up ugly , but they're certainly cluttered , and I think there's a very simple reason for that: IntelliJ (or VisualStudio, or Xcode, or anything in this class) is an expert tool. Expert tools can be insanely complex to use, and can have very steep learning curves, because the people who use them are willing and able to invest the time. In exchange, the tools assume that most users are going…

I disagree about having to look cluttered. Here's how my Visual Studio usually looks like http://i.imgur.com/imqiWGT.png

Re: IntelliJ IDEA 14.1

#13
post #2

I always fail to understood why these products are so ugly to see...

It might look much worse than Sublime Text on your Macbook when you're sitting in a coffee shop sipping your vanilla frappucino. However, apart from VS it's _the_ IDE to get things done when working with large and complex codebase. (I'm talking about multi-million LOCs, where a method rename takes 1 second in IntelliJ, and you can be pretty sure that it has properly checked out the files, put the changes into the proper VCS changeset, updated the comments accordingly, etc.)

Re: IntelliJ IDEA 14.1

#14
I'm using IntelliJ on Windows for Scala dev, and boy is it slow. I have to manually set the process priority to "Below Normal" every time, or it will soak up all system resources and music playback becomes jittery. Clicking right on anything is a four-second pause mistake.

It's free, so I shouldn't be complaining. Thanks for the product! Really, it's better than vim (especially with the intellij vim-mode plugin). I appreciate it.

But I'd feel a bit sour had I paid money for this. Especially after having seen Visual Studio. Wow, what a difference.

EDIT: laptop specs fwiw: Lenovo G505s, AMD A10, 8GB RAM, normal HDD.

EDIT2: Comparing the UI to other java apps is disingenuous. I'm no UI expert, but this looks fine. It won't win any awards, but it's not your average pile of swig.

Re: IntelliJ IDEA 14.1

#15

I'm using IntelliJ on Windows for Scala dev, and boy is it slow. I have to manually set the process priority to "Below Normal" every time, or it will soak up all system resources and music playback becomes jittery. Clicking right on anything is a four-second pause mistake. It's free, so I shouldn't be complaining. Thanks for the product! Really, it's better than vim (especially with the intellij vim-mode plugin). I a…

It depends on the language you're using (working with Scala is usually slow). Also, make sure that IntelliJ caches are on an SSD. VS is very quick, but for example parsing C# is very easy compared to Scala (partly because C# was designed for that from day zero). Maven also slows down things a bit (IntelliJ can search in classes that are not even referenced by the project.)

Re: IntelliJ IDEA 14.1

#16
post #2

I always fail to understood why these products are so ugly to see...

It might look much worse than Sublime Text on your Macbook when you're sitting in a coffee shop sipping your vanilla frappucino. However, apart from VS it's _the_ IDE to get things done when working with large and complex codebase. (I'm talking about multi-million LOCs, where a method rename takes 1 second in IntelliJ, and you can be pretty sure that it has properly checked out the files, put the changes into the pro…

I would agree, if IntelliJ's performance wasn't so bad. On my 2012 MBA I had to turn off the auto completion, because otherwise, just typing text into the editor would make the fans run on full speed and lead to stuttering and hang-ups.

So, unfortunately for performance reasons, I had to switch back to Sublime Text.

Re: IntelliJ IDEA 14.1

#17
post #2

I always fail to understood why these products are so ugly to see...

I couldn't disagree more. In my opinion it's the most decent looking IDE / code editor I've ever used. Most IDEs are cluttered with a gazillion views. Intellij focuses on the code editor instead. You can hide everything but the code editor and keep full control via keyboard shortcuts.

Re: IntelliJ IDEA 14.1

#18

I'm using IntelliJ on Windows for Scala dev, and boy is it slow. I have to manually set the process priority to "Below Normal" every time, or it will soak up all system resources and music playback becomes jittery. Clicking right on anything is a four-second pause mistake. It's free, so I shouldn't be complaining. Thanks for the product! Really, it's better than vim (especially with the intellij vim-mode plugin). I a…

It depends on the language you're using (working with Scala is usually slow). Also, make sure that IntelliJ caches are on an SSD. VS is very quick, but for example parsing C# is very easy compared to Scala (partly because C# was designed for that from day zero). Maven also slows down things a bit (IntelliJ can search in classes that are not even referenced by the project.)

Good points. I have no SSD, unfortunately.

There are two types of slow: there is slow to react, and slow to respond. I can understand that IntelliJ is having a hard time recompiling the Scala source. As you said, Scala is difficult to parse and compile.

What I don't like is the context menu taking several seconds to even appear, locking up the entire UI (!), when I right click. Or music playback going haywire just because I am switching files or refactoring. Setting it to "low priority" solves that last issue, but that doesn't make me feel better about IntelliJ.

If an app is slow, fine. But deal with it. React quickly, respond later.

PS: I say that now, but once I have a better computer, it's all "IntelliJ is great." I only feel this way because my computer can't take it.

Re: IntelliJ IDEA 14.1

#19

I'm using IntelliJ on Windows for Scala dev, and boy is it slow. I have to manually set the process priority to "Below Normal" every time, or it will soak up all system resources and music playback becomes jittery. Clicking right on anything is a four-second pause mistake. It's free, so I shouldn't be complaining. Thanks for the product! Really, it's better than vim (especially with the intellij vim-mode plugin). I a…

Well I started going back to school online, and that means ... you guessed it, Java classes!

Instructors recommended jGRASP, but I tried it briefly and did not like it too much. So, I have been playing with IntelliJ Community Edition in parallel and I prefer it. Anecdotally, I have not had the same performance issues, but I do use it on 8GB RAM + SSD laptop. So, I might be lucky by privilege here.

In the community edition, at least, there is Power Save mode. I think this halts project file indexing and other "cool" features. Maybe it would help? I also was surprised my computer was not hosed when playing with the Clojure REPL plugin, but again my laptop could be very beefy.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11725605/what-is-power-sa...

That being said, I need to do this school work on a work laptop because I got a Kindle textbook and I have not had time to convert it into PDF/ePub for use on my Linux laptop. I would love to use eclim and emacs, but that seems like a headache waiting to happen on Winboxen. Does anyone do Java/Scala dev on a Windows machine without one of the very unminimalist IDE's? I would much prefer console based, but Cygwin emacs is flimsy as it is.

http://eclim.org/install.html

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsEclim

Re: IntelliJ IDEA 14.1

#20

I'm using IntelliJ on Windows for Scala dev, and boy is it slow. I have to manually set the process priority to "Below Normal" every time, or it will soak up all system resources and music playback becomes jittery. Clicking right on anything is a four-second pause mistake. It's free, so I shouldn't be complaining. Thanks for the product! Really, it's better than vim (especially with the intellij vim-mode plugin). I a…

I have a MBP from about 1.5 years ago, 8GB RAM and SSD and I don't notice any issues w/ intellij and scala, which I use daily. However for a while I had a MBP with a standard HD and that was painful every time it indexed.
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