Linux users expect the GUI to be unusable so they split into the camps who (i) think Eclipse is the bee's knees or (ii) use vi.
The difference between IntelliJ and Eclipse is like night and day -- Eclipse fans think the plug-in feature is great but install one too many plugins and your Eclipse will get sick with pluginitis.
I recently had to use Eclipse again, after 5+ years of Emacs mostly coding sessions, and boy it was tough. I kept thinking it's just one IDE, and others are better, thinking about IntelliJ. Heh.
ps: people, take a look at Emacs, it really is nice, and only needs 8MB cough
> I kept thinking it's just one IDE, and others are better, thinking about IntelliJ. Heh.
I usually don't endorse a product or service (different tools for different tasks and different people etc) but at least try out IntelliJ. I'm pretty sure there is a reason why Google decided to dump Eclipse in favor of IntelliJ as their officially supported IDE.
You may be able to crank out code faster using vi and/or emacs - but an IDE will be more advanced to tell you mistakes that could mean a world of difference. You don't know how many times I've seen people make simple mistakes writing PHP with vi that could have easily been avoided using an IDE.
My English is often cryptic, it was flattering towards IntelliJ. Since long ago they wrote very useful code either infrastructure (their caching mechanism) or UX (thorough keyboard bindings).
What kind of errors did they fail to catch ? vi/emacs rely on external checkers, I don't know what IntelliJ uses, if they have an in-house fully fledged AST analyzer or if they reuse community made ones.
> ps: people, take a look at Emacs, it really is nice, and only needs 8MB cough
As an Emacs fan, I feel obligated to, ahh, unpack this reference.
EMACS: Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping. A Humorous Expansion of the name from when eight megabytes of RAM was more than you had, bucko.
These days, I'm sure that, if you really worked at it, you could get an Emacs process to take up as much RAM as the Chrome tab you just opened to look something up on Stack Exchange.
Some times emacs has perf issues, but Eclipse overhead is really too much for me to enjoy. And the UX is miserable, all this OOP, OSGi plugins and frameworks for this leaves me meh.
I am a complete newbie so my perspective is inherently flawed but I am wary of installing anything on a Debian machine that I can't just get using aptitude (sudo apt-get install foo).
Correct me if I am wrong but isn't it possible to create a Debian repository server at Jet Brains that I can add to my aptitude sources list and then install Intelli J and stuff from the conventional command line interface? Why does Jet Brains insist on doing things the Net beans way with opening a web browser and downloading a binary every time?
Fwiw it's worth learning how to use the excellent Debian Alternatives [1] system to install stuff not in the repo's. Download the precompiled binary, or download the source and compile it, put in $HOME, /opt, or wherever you want, then use update-alternatives to soft link it into the standard system directories (/usr, /usr/bin, /usr/local, etc). You can manage and toggle between multiple versions of the same software that way, including the repo version, and lots more benefits, see github readme below.
Not just that, but they've closed numerous bugs as "wont fix" & blamed them on the linux ecosystem. On Ubuntu, I've gone through some very annoying bugs like the IDE randomly freezing every 10-15m and needing to be restarted, even after removing openJDK & installing the official Java, and all the other annoying things they suggested.
I dislike them as a company because they claimed to support Linux, took my money, and then blamed my choice of OS when things broke. If they don't want to support linux, fine, but they shouldn't say that they do on the sales page, then act to the contrary.
> I am wary of installing anything on a Debian machine that I can't just get using aptitude (sudo apt-get install foo).
I don't think that is really an issue (anymore?) - I've installed deb packages manually and compiled stuff from scratch. The only problem you could run into is if package A from the Debain repos requires Version X.1 - but you installed some random deb which installed Version X.2 - you might get into dependency issues. I've found backports to fill this gap.
In fact the Jetbrains stuff is self contained so you need to bring your own JRE and run it from the folder that you extracted it to.
Linux users expect the GUI to be unusable so they split into the camps who (i) think Eclipse is the bee's knees or (ii) use vi.
The difference between IntelliJ and Eclipse is like night and day -- Eclipse fans think the plug-in feature is great but install one too many plugins and your Eclipse will get sick with pluginitis.