Hi,
I just spent the past 2 weeks using IntelliJ IDEA exclusively (having
used it sporatically before). I'm going to share some brief thoughts in
the hopes that it helps.
As far as I can tell, IntelliJ's killer feature is their debugger (more
broadly, their UI). Our killer feature is our profiler, and Maven
integration (more broadly, bundling more functionality standard).
* Netbeans drives development of Maven projects through Maven. This
results in better integration than IntelliJ provides (e.g. good luck
trying to start a debugging session through Maven) but it has a
downside of poor performance.
* Specifically, the REPL loop for IntelliJ is much quicker than
Netbeans for Maven projects. Compilation and execution is almost
instanteous and I also don't recall ever waiting on updating the
Maven index.
* Their UX focuses more heavily on providing just-in-time
contextually-relevant information than Netbeans. The obvious example
is how their editor will show the value of variables during a
debugging session immediately before and after a line is executed.
They also do a nice job of hiding threads with similar stacktraces
so if (for example) I've got 100 idle worker threads, the thread
list they show is not cluttered with them. I like this a lot.
The final point I'm sure you already know: our UI is a lot more klunky
than theirs. I don't mean that their IDE is "better looking" but rather
that we have many long-standing UI bugs that are simply not present on
their end (clashing foreground/background colors making text hard to
read, viewport whose default size is too small, etc).
Anyway, that's it for now. I hope it helps.
Gili
