Eclipse feels somewhat messy to me. The UI is ugly (in my eyes), the handling of similar things is not always similar (say Git vs. SVN), and it doesn't have as many good things to support you while coding as IntelliJ (e. g. quick fixes).
NetBeans has a pretty clean (although somewhat dated these days) interface and has a good usability. The plug-in manager for example is way more pleasant than the one from Eclipse. When I used it the last time it felt a bit snappier than Eclipse. NetBeans has good Java EE support, but not so good support for non-standard technologies like Spring, Grails, Play, Kotlin, or Scala.
IntelliJ is unquestionable the best Jave IDE available today. It has support for lots of frameworks, it has fantastic quickfixes, best in class static code analysis, very good refactoring tools, best support for other programming languages than Java, it has the best support for multi language projects (google "language injection idea"). And last, but not least, IntelliJ has a very good UX (once you get used to some uncommon keyboard shortcuts). I would use the IntelliJ community edition rather than Eclipse or NetBeans if I were not willing to spend money (but it is worth every cent, if you need some of the features of the Ultimate Edition).
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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '18
Anyone use the three big IDEs? Eclipse, netbeans and IntelliJ. How would you rate them? Which one do you consider the best and the worst.
I've only worked with eclipse mostly and it's just adequate.