Things possible in IntelliJ that aren't possible in Eclipse?

Answer 1

The IntelliJ debugger has a very handy feature called "Evaluate Expression", that is by far better than eclipses pendant. It has full code-completion and i concider it to be generally "more useful".

Answer 2

There is only one reason I use intellij and not eclipse: Usability

Whether it is debugging, refactoring, auto-completion.. Intellij is much easier to use with consistent key bindings, options available where you look for them etc. Feature-wise, it will be tough for intellij to catch up with Eclipse, as the latter has much more plugins available that intellij, and is easily extensible.

Answer 3

Well, for me it's a thousand tiny things. Some of the macros, the GUI layout in general in Eclipse I find awful. I can't open multiple projects in different windows in Eclipse. I can open multiple projects, but then it's view based system swaps a bunch of things around on me when I switch files. IntelliJ's code inspections seem better. Its popup helpers to fix common issues is nice. Lots of simple usability things like the side bar where I can hover over a hot spot and it'll tell me every implementing subclass of a method or the method I'm implementing and from where.

Whenever I've had to use, or watch someone use, Eclipse it seems like they can do most of the things I can do in IntelliJ, but it takes them longer and it's clunkier.

Answer 4

Intellij has a far superior SVN plug-in than either Subversive or Subclipse and it works! The amount of time we've wasted merging source files using Eclipse doesn't bear thinking about. This isn't an issue with IntelliJ because the plugin helps you much more.

Also the Subclipse plugin is unreliable - we regularly have instances where the plugin doesn't think there has been any code checked in to SVN by other developers, but there has - the CI server has processed them!

Answer 5

Two things that IntelliJ does that Eclipse doesn't that are very valuable to me:

Method separators: those faint gray lines between methods make code much more readable

Text anti-aliasing: makes code look so nice in the IDE

Answer 6

First of all I love intellij. There are at least a hundred features it has that eclipse lack. I'm talking magnitudes better in reliability and intelligence that no hyperbole can describe when it comes to refactoring, renaming, moving and others which have already been mentioned.

BUT, there is one thing that intellij does not allow which eclipse does. It does not allow running multiple projects at once under the same vm.

When you have separate projects for the front, middle, core, agents..etc, where they all have to interact with each other, you can not quickly modify and debug at the same time, afaik. The only way I current cope with this is to use ant scripts to deploy and update jars in dependent projects, or use maven.

Eclipse allows multiple projects to be debugged under one ide vm instance.