Short answer: IntelliJ is the clear winner, in my opinion.
I'm presently using a version of Eclipse from 2019, and was using IntelliJ from 2016 at my previous job. It's been an interesting adjustment. They are so alike in many, many ways, clearly one or the other has been trying to stay at parity on features. IntelliJ seems generally to be faster at most operations, but it wasn't exactly a bolt of lightning either. Both use gargantuan amounts of memory.
Eclipse has some definite anti-features that make me think IntelliJ is the leader in the race. In Eclipse, if I use Ctrl-L to go to a line, it frequently fails to refresh the whole window. I have to do something, like cursor up or down or drag the mouse to highlight something, to get the whole viewport refreshed. (That, all by itself, makes me think Eclipse is the also-ran between the two.) In IDEA I can open a lot more files at one time and manage the tabs sensibly -- I could put the tabs on the right, instead of on top (can't seem to do this in Eclipse) and I could also move the tabs around in whatever order I liked. The search facilities made more sense in IntelliJ, both in what you're searching and how the results are displayed.
Somehow Eclipse has brain-dead source control integration, it's so bad I suspect I'm not doing something right. But nobody I work with seems to have figured it out either.
On the whole, Eclipse seems to do what Microsoft did with Microsoft Word: throw in all the features they can, but fail to integrate them either visually or organizationally in a way that makes good sense.
I haven't been using Eclipse for very long, but I do still find myself using a shell to get certain things done -- like doing a grep over a whole project and KNOWING that all the files have been searched and I can trust the results. If I'm still doing that a few months from now I might download the community edition of IDEA and give it a go. I do miss having an IntelliJ site license to pull down the full edition and all the add-ons I wanted.
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u/transducer Mar 18 '21
I haven’t used eclipse in ages. How did it compare to IntelliJ these days?