chris clarke

Eclipse vs. IntelliJ : Final Showdown (sort of)

Having used both Eclipse and IntelliJ for a while now - I’ve decided to have my own showdown between the two IDEs. Similar to JK, I’ll be recording every fault, brilliance, missing feature, annoyance and crash in this blog entry. After a month or two of using both - I’ll decide which one has further to go to become King of all Java IDEs.

I’ve gravitated between the two of them for a while and I’m probably one of the few who’s yet to make their mind up. Rather than knee-jerking between the two I’ll also be looking for ways around things, and seeing exactly how hard it would be to just dig in and code a plugin for “But (Eclipse/IntelliJ) doesn’t have feature X”.

• No HTML editor in eclipse - easily solved, installed webtools.
• No widen selection (Apple-w) in eclipse - not a big thing but a feature that you get really used to in IntelliJ
• Lack of an easy way to create a test in IntelliJ - solved by downloading the Test Dox plugin (available from the IntelliJ Plugin Repository) - now I just hit Alt-Shift-T on a class and it takes me to the corresponding test, or offers to create one in the absence of an existing test.