The Love of My Dev Life
May 15, 2018
The Love of My Dev Life
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with IntelliJ IDEA
IDEA has been our IDE of choice for as long as we can remember. We are quite satisfied with its advanced features, add-on driven extensibility, user-friendliness, and robustness. While the Community Edition has great support for most of our work, the Ultimate's license is definitely worth the price has given the plethora of additional features that it unlocks.
- Seamless VCS integration: we use both Git and Mercurial, without ever having to resort to command-line tools
- Built-in support for multiple languages and file formats, complete with syntax coloring, auto-format, and suggestions
- Built-in Java class decompilation feature for quick peeks into third-party library sources
- Rich extensibility via plugins, both built-in and third party
- Support for JavaScript in Community Edition: understandably this is a strategical decision, but still, it would have been awesome if Community had JavaScript!
- Indexing can sometimes hinder development progress, especially in large projects
- To be frank the Ultimate license is somewhat expensive for a developing country like mine, however, I would say it would pay off in the long run - especially with the student and continuity discounts
IDEA is much more intuitive, user-friendly and feature-rich than any of the other IDEs that I have encountered so far. It's not just the Ultimate - the Community Edition has the same UX (just missing a few features), and although the community may be smaller, JetBrains has an impressive community support system as well.