The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5)

IntelliJ IDEA

Hi

Was just wondering, has anyone here used IntelliJ IDEA for programming in Java? I´ve mostly used Visual Studio.net for programming and thought it was pretty good but now I like IDEA much better, it has a LOT of great shortcuts and options that really speed up my coding. Do you know if there is any program that has a similar editor as IDEA that's available for coding in C++ ? Any suggestions? What are your favorite IDE's? Excuse my english if it´s wrong, not my native language :)

Eric Grenvalds
Monday, October 27, 2003

I'm a huge fan of IntelliJ Idea. It makes java and JSP development much quicker and easier than any other tool I've worked with. I simply can't say enough good things about it.

I don't know of anything similar for C++, although IntelliJ (now JetBrains) is apparently working on an Idea-like IDE for C# (written in C#). They haven't shipped anything in this vein yet, even in their Early Access Program, so I doubt they're close to a v1.0 release.

From what I understand, it'd be much more difficult to make a similar tool for C++ than for Java/C#. :(

(BTW, I'm not affiliated with IntelliJ/JetBrains in any way - I'm just a happy customer.)

schmoe
Monday, October 27, 2003

IntelliJ kicks ass, let me tell you.

The shortcuts do take time to learn, I've printed a cute triangular thing with all the shortcuts on it (available on their website). But once learnt, it increases productivity on an enormous scale :)

Not to mention all the underline types and so forth...

worms in my brain get them out
Monday, October 27, 2003

IDEA's C# product is going to be a plug-in for VS.NET.

Walter Rumsby
Monday, October 27, 2003

I'd just like to add my praise for IDEA. It just makes development so much easier. Refactoring support is the big plus but the source code navigation is also superb. Shortcuts to go to the definition of a symbol (method, field, variable etc.), quick access to "find usages". Don't forget the intelligent autocompletion or the Ctrl+j live templates.

Overall it really works with the programmer with very little learning curve. Everyone here at work swapped from various other systems (from notepad, emacs, netbeans etc.) at the beginning of the year and it has paid us back at least ten fold. If you're writing Java it's the best.

Well, that turned out to be an unbiased view didn't it :)

Alex
Monday, October 27, 2003

YMMV, but I've found IDEA to be the most reponsive of the various Java IDEs for editing and moving about my source code.

Andrew Reid
Monday, October 27, 2003

Try Visual Assist
http://www.wholetomato.com/
for Visual C++
Its a start

Martyn Sloss
Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Without getting into a religious war of IDEs.
I've tried IntelliJ IDEA and although I liked it alot, I still prefer Eclipse IDE.
It has all the IntelliJ features (refactoring, symbol links etc. etc. etc.) but it is also open source and you can write a plug-in for it in about 5 minutes. IMHO & YMMV...

Tal Rotbart
Tuesday, October 28, 2003

IDEA is insanely great.

Ethan Herdrick
Tuesday, October 28, 2003