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I use IDEA and it's *better for me* than Eclipse. But it's arrogant to say that IDEA is better than Eclipse for everyone.

IDE choice is mainly personal preference. There is no 'best' or 'better' IDE for everyone.

If you want an objective way (instead of just your your opinion) to determine the best IDE, consider this: Far more people use Eclipse than any other IDE. Almost all of them can use any IDE they want. Price is not an issue. Yet they choose to use Eclipse. The consensus is that Eclipse is better.

@devdanke Popularity != better

I think the reason most developers use Eclipse is that it was the first free ($$) Java IDE that provided an excellent editor and refactoring support. At the time IDEA wasn't free and Netbeans was awful. Fast forward a few years and Netbeans is excellent and IDEA community edition can be found on GitHub. By this stage most devs have got used to Eclipse and are unlikely to switch. I started using Eclipse, then switched to Netbeans around 2005 when Sun drastically improved Netbeans. Fast forward to 2011/12 and I've started using IDEA due to their support for Scala (and the demise of other language support in Netbeans *cough* Scala, Ruby, Python) and the fact that I can use the community edition for free. If I'm going to do my Scala work in IDEA then why shouldn't I simply use the same IDE for my Java work?

"Popularity != better"

Really? Ever? The majority of people never know what's best for themselves? Hmmmm.

Eclipse has a really good Vim plugin.. good enough for me..

I agree, it's difficult to say which IDE is best. I use IDEA professionally and I use Eclipse & Netbeans personally at home. I like them all, and I have gripes with them all too. It just boils down to which one facilitates my needs really. No question the indexing power of IDEA is fantastic (I'm currently using 10.5) and I enjoy developing applications in it and I truly believe it helps me develop applications faster. Gripes? Of all the rich features, the one it lacks that Eclipse does so much better is deleting projects. I mean...how clunky is it that you have to close IDEA out, then go to your file folder(s) and delete your IDEA ipr & iml files and clean your your index files in order to start over. In Eclipse you just click the project and delete and you're done! Eclipse at least from my experience as the richest integration and plugin support for any development idiom you can think of out there because of it's popularity which makes it useful for me at home to try stuff out before I apply it to my professional world. Gripes? For me at least, I hate all the damn window panes all over the place....yes, yes I know you can minimize/remove but they sort of just creep up/out on your in places you didn't intend for and it just annoys me more than anything, but not really a hindrance. Netbeans? It's a nice simple IDE really. I mainly have only used it for working exclusively on J2EE / Glassfish / mySQL projects and their great drag n' drop "Swing" application builder is great. Gripes? Well, it's "cute" but I'd rather use IDEA or Eclipse...

It's pretty stupid to make an argument that IDEA is objectively better than Eclipse. For me, it just cannot be better for a lot more high-level reasons than those little details (which I don't care about enough to override my high-level preferences). Besides, Eclipse gets other details right that IDEA gets wrong.

Also, his main argument that Eclipse doesn't know the context is plain wrong. He seems to suggest that Eclipse doesn't index all source and doesn't build an AST model. That's not true. It does it, and it does it faster than IDEA. It's just that Eclipse doesn't have as much analysis (Intellisense?) and UI built around that knowledge.

But wait, there is a plug-in called code recommenders for Eclipse which enables some of that same kind of intellisense. Granted, it's quite new and maybe not perfect yet, but quite promising, I think. http://www.eclipse.org/recommenders/

BTW, I upvoted this anyway, because that was the best effort of an IDEA > Eclipse claim I've seen so far.