Re: [scala-ide-user] Why Eclipse over IntelliJ IDEA? :'(

[Clint Gilbert]

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I can't speak for anyone else, but I can say why I prefer Eclipse for
Scala work:

* I'm comfortable in Eclipse, having used it for many years.

* IntelliJ looks very bad on my platform (Linux); Eclipse fits into my
desktop environment much better.

* I haven't seen a compelling reason to switch. My colleague is a
longtime IntelliJ fan, and we work together on a medium-sized Scala
project. Each of us has about as many problems with our IDE, but
they're just different problems, not bigger or smaller ones. We're
about as productive as each other. There hasn't been anything major that
one of us could do that the other couldn't.

On 04/17/2013 11:28 AM, Peter Fisck wrote:
> Hi! I'm just curious why you went with Eclipse over Intellij IDEA?
>
> First of all, I want to say that I really appreciate what you are doing
> at Typesafe. Scala is by far my favorite language, and I really love how
> active the development of the Scala IDE plugin is. But there is
> something I just can't get over. Why on earth did you choose Eclipse
> over IntelliJ IDEA? :'(
>
> Every user review of the two IDEs that I've come across online
> /strongly/ favours IntelliJ. Here's two of the first hits if you google
> "intellij vs eclipse":
>
> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/21987/how-is-intellij-better-than-eclipse
> http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2012/01/intellij-vs-eclipse.html ( read the
> comments )
>
> "IntelliJ is MUCH better than eclipse (used eclipse for over 10 years)."
>
> "I used Eclipse for years as a JEE developer. Recently, a co-worker
> convinced me to try out IntelliJ Ultimate (My company bought it for me).
> I don't think I'll ever go back to Eclipse. I feel that IntelliJ allows
> me to do what I need and I never feel like I'm "fighting" my IDE as I
> always felt with Eclipse."
>
> So .. I'm currently thorn between an awesome language with a mediocre
> IDE (Eclipse) or using either Sublime Text or the unpolished plugin for
> IntelliJ.
>
> Why did you go with Eclipse? Thanks :)
>
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[iulian dragos]

Hi Peter,

In short, and in no particular order:

- Eclipse is what most developers use today (see for instance the ZeroTurnaround Developer Productivity Report)

- Eclipse is open-source

- IntelliJ has a commercial entity behind it that does a very good job in supporting Scala, and we wanted to provide an alternative

IntelliJ is a great IDE, and people should choose the tool that works best for them, even when they use Scala.

cheers,

iulian

On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 5:28 PM, Peter Fisck <niklas...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi! I'm just curious why you went with Eclipse over Intellij IDEA? 

First of all, I want to say that I really appreciate what you are doing at Typesafe. Scala is by far my favorite language, and I really love how active the development of the Scala IDE plugin is. But there is something I just can't get over. Why on earth did you choose Eclipse over IntelliJ IDEA? :'(

Every user review of the two IDEs that I've come across online strongly favours IntelliJ. Here's two of the first hits if you google "intellij vs eclipse":

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/21987/how-is-intellij-better-than-eclipse

http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2012/01/intellij-vs-eclipse.html ( read the comments )

"IntelliJ is MUCH better than eclipse (used eclipse for over 10 years)."

"I used Eclipse for years as a JEE developer. Recently, a co-worker convinced me to try out IntelliJ Ultimate (My company bought it for me). I don't think I'll ever go back to Eclipse. I feel that IntelliJ allows me to do what I need and I never feel like I'm "fighting" my IDE as I always felt with Eclipse."

So .. I'm currently thorn between an awesome language with a mediocre IDE (Eclipse) or using either Sublime Text or the unpolished plugin for IntelliJ. 

Why did you go with Eclipse? Thanks :)

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[Peter Fisck]

Thanks the for quick answer.

My team is developing a project in Play (2.1.1). But as a web project, we need the best tool both front end and back end. Webstorm (ie intellij idea) seems to be the best tool front-end. Is it recommended to stick with Eclipse for the back end, or is the intellij plugin up to date and fully working to the extent that it can be used in a real (important) project? 

I previously had the feeling that the intellij plugin was almost abandoned or at least (very) second class citizen, but I might have got the wrong impression. I'd love to use the same IDE for both front-end and back-end. 

Thanks again :)

[Michael Slinn]

I use IntelliJ on Ubuntu Linux for most of my development. It looks great, especially with the Darcula theme - Eclipse cannot provide a theme for the entire IDE, just the editors and selected other panels. Also, the IDEA plugins are open source, on github.

Mike

[Clint Gilbert]

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It's true that IntelliJ has better theming. And maybe I should try
IntelliJ again, the last time I did on Linux was about 9 months ago.
Back then the fonts and visual elements looked very ugly and out of
place compared to the native widgets Eclipse used, but there's been
plenty of time for progress since then.

> <https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-LpWT5DnqvXs/UXBIgZsSRSI/AAAAAAAABrA/9b8y_mSBFNE/s1600/idea-mocc-build2.png>

>
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[François-Xavier Thomas]

Well, I just switched to IntelliJ, I couldn't stand Eclipse eating 45% CPU while being _idle_ anymore. Not sure if it was misconfigured or just being hungry.

IntelliJ has a power-save option that works great if you're on battery power, by the way! Also, I can use it even on small notebooks -- 11, 13 inches for instance. I mean, Eclipse is IMHO a giant waste of screen space.

Oh, and the official Vim plugin is definitely a nice addition for me, although most people wouldn't care at all.

Cheers,
François-Xavier

[Peter Fisck]

I actually went ahead an bought the Ultimate edition today (half price until 22th April); Got the plugin working, and it actually works amazingly! 

@Appearence: I don't know about Linux, but on OSX, IntelliJ looks stunningly beautiful (got a retina monitor). Eclipse on the other hand looks pixelated and ugly (eclipse always has). IntelliJ also runs much faster/smoother imo. There's only two things I don't like: (1) The worksheet compiles a little slower than the eclipse worksheet (2) There was this one place where IntelliJ didn't infer type correctly, and ended up with "Any" instead of "Decl" (ie what i wanted) where Eclipse/Scala-IDE inferred correctly. Other than that , I really recommend it. I hope both IntelliJ/JetBrains and Typesafe will (keep) giving love and attention to the intellij plugin in the future. It really is the IDE of choice! (Darcula ftw!) :D

[Clint Gilbert]

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On 04/18/2013 04:16 PM, Fran�ois-Xavier Thomas wrote:
> Well, I just switched to IntelliJ, I couldn't stand Eclipse eating
> 45% CPU while being _idle_ anymore. Not sure if it was
> misconfigured or just being hungry.

That's definitely not normal. I use Eclipse for Scala work on 3
different machines, and don't have this problem. Perhaps it was heap
space? All modern Java IDEs are quite memory-hungry, in my experience.

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[virtualeyes]

I will emphatically join Clint Gilbert in stating that IntelliJ is flat out hideous on Linux (Fedora 18 here).

Even if it offered far superior Scala support than ScalaIDE (which I doubt) Eclipse plugin, I'd still use the latter based on the simple fact that I spend the majority of my coding life in my IDE.

I'd drop down to vim before adopting IntelliJ in its current state on Linux.

[Clint Gilbert]

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My colleague runs IntelliJ on OSX, and it looks very nice. On Linux
it looks (or looked) much worse; I've heard it's due to the Swing
implementation IntelliJ uses, but who knows.

The compilation problems match what my colleague and I have noticed.
He'll occasionally encounter - like you did - Scala code that gives
errors in IntelliJ but is actually valid. I suspect this has to do
with Jetbrains' approach: as far as I know, they use their own
parser/presentation compiler/whatever for Scala, not the one from
Typesafe/EPFL.

Since the Eclipse plugin uses the official compiler, it seems to win
on correctness. I don't see the same kid of errors for valid Scala
that my colleague does. To be fair, I get other, different kinds of
hiccups when running Eclipse that are of roughly similar severity.

In my and my colleagues' experience, neither IDE is perfect; both have
similar amounts of problems, just different ones.

>> scala-ide-use...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>. For more
>> options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out
> <https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out>.

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[virtualeyes]

Perhaps things have changed on Linux since I tried IntelliJ a few months ago.

No compelling reason to switch from Eclipse here -- SBT + Juno + ScalaIDE is quite a nice combo for Play projects.

I suspect one reason IntelliJ "looks great" on Ubuntu is that Ubuntu out of the box probably has the cleanest UI of any Linux distro.

Eclipse is a bit of a screen real estate hog, yes, but if your window manager has full screen support and you hide extraneous toolbars, it's not so bad (huge external monitor helps as well ;-))

[nafg]

On Wednesday, April 17, 2013 12:51:53 PM UTC-4, Peter Fisck wrote:

Thanks the for quick answer.

My team is developing a project in Play (2.1.1). But as a web project, we need the best tool both front end and back end. Webstorm (ie intellij idea) seems to be the best tool front-end. Is it recommended to stick with Eclipse for the back end, or is the intellij plugin up to date and fully working to the extent that it can be used in a real (important) project? 

I previously had the feeling that the intellij plugin was almost abandoned or at least (very) second class citizen, but I might have got the wrong impression.

That's not true at all. The only argument anyone could possibly make (whether it has validity or not) is that their approach is less wise long-term: They code all the scala analysis themselves rather than hooking into the scala compiler as the eclipse plugin does. However today their plugin is certainly has much more scala intelligence.

[Hadil Sabbagh]

I switched to IntelliJ because I couldn't get ScalaTest to work on Eclipse. If anyone can help me with that, I'll switch back... :)

[François-Xavier Thomas]

> On 04/18/2013 04:16 PM, François-Xavier Thomas wrote:
>> Well, I just switched to IntelliJ, I couldn't stand Eclipse eating
>> 45% CPU while being _idle_ anymore. Not sure if it was
>> misconfigured or just being hungry.
>
> That's definitely not normal. I use Eclipse for Scala work on 3
> different machines, and don't have this problem. Perhaps it was heap
> space? All modern Java IDEs are quite memory-hungry, in my experience.

I think I've put 1G of heap space, should be more than enough.

Well, one of the other reasons could be that Illustrator and the Android emulator were eating up the rest of my RAM, but I'm definitely getting an improvement with IntelliJ. I'm sure it'd be more than fine if I could use 8 or 16G RAM and a 24' monitor, but I like it lightweight!

[ijuma]

Hi,

An aside, IntelliJ CE is open-source as well as many plugins that are not included out of the box (including the Scala one).

Best,

Ismael

[Channing Walton]

Where I work there are a mix of IDEs. I keep trying Eclipse, IntelliJ, Emacs, and SublimeText with their respective support for scala. I do this so I can understand which IDEs work best for me. The codebase is about 15000 lines of scala using a fair amount of scalaz etc.

Whilst I keep trying IntelliJ I always go back to Eclipse for two simple reasons: compilation and error markers in the editor. 

Despite its latest support for an external compiler, for some reason it always gets in a mess and full rebuilds are needed every 10 mins or so. The Type Aware highlighting is completely useless, it shows errors when there aren't any and doesn't show errors where there are problems. I have reported both of these problems many times, some progress has been made but it seems to take a lower priority to other features.

IntelliJ is a great IDE, but its scala support has to get a lot better - call me picky but compilation and error reporting accuracy are important to me.

Other members of the team who are fanatical intellij users actually turn off compilation and run sbt on the command line, they just use it as a syntax highlighting editor with some completion.

The one thing intellij does much better than eclipse is search (find references).

But, I am due to try IntelliJ again and will be very happy if these problems have been fixed.

[Mike Slinn]

>
> Despite its latest support for an external compiler, for some reason
> it always gets in a mess and full rebuilds are needed every 10 mins or
> so.

If you work with Play, this happens anyway because Play recompiles
everything at the slightest provocation. For a Play app, IntelliJ is
only used for editing and debugging - same as Eclipse.

> The Type Aware highlighting is completely useless, it shows errors
> when there aren't any and doesn't show errors where there are
> problems. I have reported both of these problems many times, some
> progress has been made but it seems to take a lower priority to other
> features.

IntelliJ's external compiler support is not 100% working with Scala yet,
so I turn it off. Type-aware highlighting is better than it used to be,
although both IntelliJ and Eclipse have their issues in this regard. In
particular, Play template syntax checking is a bit wobbly for both IDEs;
for Play template support you should install the optional Play 2.0
Support plugin - which is just a bit newer than one would like. I'm sure
there will be updates soon for that plugin.

>
> IntelliJ is a great IDE, but its scala support has to get a lot better
> - call me picky but compilation and error reporting accuracy are
> important to me.

IDEA v12.1.1 is much better with Scala than v11 was - have you tried it?

Mike

[Channing Walton]

On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:42, Mike Slinn <msl...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Despite its latest support for an external compiler, for some reason it always gets in a mess and full rebuilds are needed every 10 mins or so.
> If you work with Play, this happens anyway because Play recompiles everything at the slightest provocation. For a Play app, IntelliJ is only used for editing and debugging - same as Eclipse.

I'm not using Play but it doesn't surprise me that things would get confused if something else it fiddling around.

>> IntelliJ is a great IDE, but its scala support has to get a lot better - call me picky but compilation and error reporting accuracy are important to me.
> IDEA v12.1.1 is much better with Scala than v11 was - have you tried it?

I haven't. I was thinking about it today since its been about a month since I last tried. I'll do it tomorrow.

[Mirco Dotta]

I'm on Ubuntu with 12GB of RAM but eclipse is practically unusable even when mark occurrences is turned off. Has anyone found a way to solve this problem?

What version of the Scala IDE are you using? Please, check it's indeed v3.0.0.

Also, how much heap are you reserving for Eclipse (look in the eclipse.ini). From your description, the best guess I have is that Eclipse is spending a lot of time doing garbage collection. If the problem persists, maybe let's discuss it on a different thread (and not hijack this one)

-- Mirco

[Naing Myo Aung]

Sorry, didn't mean to hijack this thread. I've got 2GB allocated to eclipse.

[Mark Haniford]

Channing,

Have you tried Intellij's latest Scala plugin?  In my experience, it has good compilation and error markers in the editor.

--

[Channing Walton]

On Wednesday, 24 April 2013 11:47:22 UTC+1, Mark wrote:

Channing,

Have you tried Intellij's latest Scala plugin?  In my experience, it has good compilation and error markers in the editor.

Hi, I've been using the latest nightly for a few days. Its a lot better than it was but scalaz defeats the Type Aware highlighting. Compilation is a lot better too. Its pretty good.