I've tried this version for Grails project. Integration for Groovy is less efficient than STS (based upon Eclipse). Currently, the best stays IntelliJ.
Netbeans is less compelling now that we have IntelliJ CE but given a choice between Eclipse and Netbeans, I would choose Netbeans every time!
Eclipse has always seemed to me to be baroque and over complicated, for example why do I need to change to a specific perspective to perform a specific task?
Most new Eclipse users don't understand that you can configure your perspective with whichever windows you want. Which in itself is a kind usability fail on Eclipse's part.
I hear you. After a few years of Eclipse's goofy tiled interface, I switched over to NetBeans. I much prefer the undockable windows (make the editor use most of the screen, thank you very much), rather than having to pop up an extra Eclipse Window and then strip it down to edit, every time I started Eclipse.
Depending on what you are building, NetBeans is a great option. Its support for J2ME is excellent, for instance. I also prefer it for JSP stuff. I have used it to quickly cobble together Swing apps too and the new interface builder seems interesting. Never really tried it with PHP or C, but it doesn't look too bad. For Python an Django work, I like Emacs.
Like Tim said, Eclipse is overly and needlessly complicated.
As for IntelliJ, never bothered to try. It seems to have a very passionate user base, but, from what I saw, I don't know why.
I use for it PHP and I really like it, especially with the Mercurial stuff built-in. I've heard Jetbrains PHP IDE is better but of all the others I've tried over the years, Netbeans is by far my favourite.
Heh, I haven't paid for an IDE since Turbo C but I've yet to hear a bad word said against this one. If it doesn't suffer from the occasional memory gobbling antics of Netbeans then I might treat myself to an early birthday present.
You should! :) A couple of years ago I was skeptical, "Why would I pay that if I can get something good for free (Eclipse)?" Once I tried it for 2 months (now the trial only 30days), I couldnt help but buying the personal license. just happen that they had discount on easter.
PHPStorm still isn't able to handle autocompletion for cascading class / folder structures, where there is more than one class/file with the same name (but in different folders) such as Kohana or FuelPHP:
I have been using netbeans and eclipse for a long time and can even remember using the abomination that was jbuilder... currently I am using an older netbeans version (6.1/6.8) for very specific product-centric development and it works just fine, there are a lot of great plugins to choose from and it integrates with pretty much all popular source control systems.
The same can be said for eclipse and I think there was a time when the eclipse framework was just so much "snappier" due to SWT that people forgot all about netbeans... but with more recent JDKs and more recent versions of netbeans, this isn't necessarily the case anymore.
IntelliJ has always seemed incredibly neat and those guys are doing a great job considering they are up against giants like sunoracle and IBM - personally the only thing that ultimately kept me from using intellij more at work was the price but I see they are offering personal licenses at a more reasonable price now so it is definitely a viable alternative to look at and try for devs.
IIRC, IntelliJ was the first IDE to have intelligent refactoring features and be usable, at a time when Eclipse was an unbearable memory monster and quite feature-poor.
It also has very good JavaScript support, I would say that in my opinion it is one of the top JavaScript IDE's. I also like it's JAX-RS tooling. I still get a lot of weird looks from people when I tell them I use Netbeans but several developers I know have switched after watching my workflow for web apps. That is the thing about Netbeans, it may not have the breadth that Eclipse has, but for the thing's that it is good for, it does them very well.
I have written Java in the past, but I don't use the language now. I use exclusively vim features and plugins to do all that things you asked in other languages though. For example I navigate around with HJKL, gg/G, gd, and "".
Navigation? Use ctags to create a cross reference file for the editor. Press ctrl-] to jump to definition, press ctrl-T go go back.
Having said that, I sometimes use vim for really quick edits to known code, or use the vim plugin for NB, so I get familiar quick keystrokes AND all the outline (navigator), javadoc, debugger and other windows available.
I've tried 7.0 recently for a project requiring Jython 2.2 and it was a huge fail (I ended up with eclipse+PyDev, which shine on that particular task).
I might give it another try, but I'm quite partial to IntelliJ for other stuff.
I'm currently using 3 IDE's. IntelliJ for Java, Flash Builder (Eclipse) for Flex, and NetBeans for PHP. I made an effort to switch to Eclipse for everything a while back, but find NetBeans my favorite tool for PHP, especially with the Zend Framework. I love the simple interface and it just seems to figure things out for autocomplete, refactoring, etc. better than anything I've tried for PHP. It's really nice to see Oracle continuing development on it.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 59.1 ms ] threadEclipse has always seemed to me to be baroque and over complicated, for example why do I need to change to a specific perspective to perform a specific task?
http://roboprogs.com/devel/2009.09.html
The vim (key assignment) editor NB plugin is kind of useful as well.
Like Tim said, Eclipse is overly and needlessly complicated.
As for IntelliJ, never bothered to try. It seems to have a very passionate user base, but, from what I saw, I don't know why.
http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/WI-2457?projectKey=WI...
That's one reason for me to keep using Netbeans, which I think is great for PHP.
The same can be said for eclipse and I think there was a time when the eclipse framework was just so much "snappier" due to SWT that people forgot all about netbeans... but with more recent JDKs and more recent versions of netbeans, this isn't necessarily the case anymore.
IntelliJ has always seemed incredibly neat and those guys are doing a great job considering they are up against giants like sunoracle and IBM - personally the only thing that ultimately kept me from using intellij more at work was the price but I see they are offering personal licenses at a more reasonable price now so it is definitely a viable alternative to look at and try for devs.
- How do you refactor code?
- How do you navigate code (e.g. Eclipse will let you click on a class and it'll find the appropriate source file if available)?
- Do you have a sense of whether using vim vs. an IDE affects your efficiency or correctness?
- Do you have an equivalent for things like autocomplete, intellisense, organise imports etc.?
- What are IDE users missing out by not using vim?
- What kind of code do you write e.g. is it a small number of heavily optimised classes or a large number of, say, feature driven classes?
Having said that, I sometimes use vim for really quick edits to known code, or use the vim plugin for NB, so I get familiar quick keystrokes AND all the outline (navigator), javadoc, debugger and other windows available.