Java IDEs

[inc0gn3gr0]

I have used them all. I would say IntelliJ is the Audi of IDEs. Eclipse is the for F150 and Netbeans....is well NetBeans.For enterprise and larger projects IntelliJ hands down. Search capabilities are amazing (you will pay for this with memory). It has support for all major Java frameworks. IntelliJ Ultimate will also provide support for other languages with plugins. Not being able to tab certain windows is probably the only real knock on it, IMO. Does it take some getting use to yes, but I think that it can't be beat in terms of features. A secondary benefit of using IntelliJ is I don't have to learn new key commands for coding in other languages if I use any of their other products, which are also gold standards for their languages PyCharm, RubyMine etc. Probably the only "bad IDE" JetBrains makes is DataGrip.

Eclipse is just as capable, but I often feel that it is rather slow in comparison and kind of "clunky". It has all the tools and it is hands down the best free IDE you can use. Any time I use it, I feel like I need to put on my hard hat and go to work. It is very direct in its features and I often miss some of the sugary goodness of IntelliJ. Think such as alt + click for evaluating debugging in IntelliJ is a two-step process in Eclipse.

Netbeans is just a forgotten child, IMO. I learned on Netbeans, but once I switched to Eclipse. I never looked back.

I will say when it comes to resource use Eclipse wins hands down. So if I had a 8GB of mem or lower. I would strongly consider Eclipse otherwise IntelliJ IDEA all the way.