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He hit the nail on the head; IDEA exudes excellence...that's the reason why people are willing to buy a license out of their own pocket. It's just that 'excellent'

Personally, I still like Eclipse better. I've tried to use IntelliJ on more than a casual basis (actually, I tried to confine my IDE usage to IntelliJ for a week) and the result was practically no productivity on anything. Now, I'll put a lot of that down to IDE unfamiliarity, so what I do is I come back to IntelliJ every so often and do a couple hours worth of work with it. In a lot of ways, I find IntelliJ lagging behind Eclipse (most notably incremental compilation).

Now, I won't challenge the fact that a lot of developers have the opposite feelings and their opinion is just as valid as mine. Still, I just wanted to make it clear that a lot of developers using Eclipse (and I would indeed hazard the word "most") are using it *because they want to*.

If you think IntelliJ doesn't have incremental compilation, then you are a VERY VERY VERY novice user of IntelliJ
CTRL+F9 = Make Project.

Most are using it Eclipse b/c it is free. I'd reckon Eclipse would lose at least half its users if it raised it's price to be equal to IntelliJ.

I liken motives for buying IntelliJ to an example in the movie Kill Bill. All of those professional hitters of the deadly cobra viper gang wanted that top quality samurai sword...when you find a tool that gives you that edge, and it's the main part of what you do then it's worth it.

If you think that that's incremental compilation, then you are a VERY VERY novice Eclipse user. :-) (though, to be more precise this is Eclipse JDT that we're talking about, not Eclipse)

Eclipse's incremental compilation runs on save and just as quickly. I haven't manually built a project (except to do a clean rebuild) in years. It's really amazing how much time this feature saves. Coupling this feature with the class swapping available in debug mode takes your development cycle from this:

Code -> Build -> Run

To just:

Code

:-) It kind of sounds like a collection of buzzwords, but seriously I can start up the application I'm working on at the beginning of the day, and then just change source files from then on out. Without doing anything else, I can just Alt-Tab to the application and see the results.

You claimed to be "I've tried to use IntelliJ on more than a casual basis"; that's the only reason why I mentioned your novice status.

However I have used Eclipse before, and unless memory has failed me, my eclipse project does not compile until I hit save...so you are effectively comparing a save key / mouse press in Eclipse vs Ctrl F9 IntelliJ. This all being spurred on by your claim IntelliJ doesn't have incremental compiliation.

As an aside, I'd much rather have debugging + hot swapping recompile with a key press. Why? B/c you assume that your code change will be limited to one class / change; whereas I only want hot swap to invoke after I have made ALL my changes.

But diff strokes for diff folks.

jola_zm, I like you comment. IntelliJ is so great that software developers are willing to bypass their company and spend their own hard earned money on it. There are not a lot of products that can tout that.

"IntelliJ, 100% keyboard friendly!"