I’m sure this will not be the only time I post on this matter. I’ve been a huge fan of JetBrains java IDE IntelliJ for the last two years since been introduced to it at 3Q. A guy called Steve Quinlan there showed me the ropes and nailed the hotkey printout to my monitor. Their tagline is ‘develop with pleasure’ – this I have found is an understatement. However there are subtle differences using IntelliJ under linux and windows. I’ve been using IntelliJ on and off inside of Linux for the past two years… and more intensively lately. (8-10+ hours a day). Those subtle differences are in fact IntelliJ Linux Annoyances; and can sometimes turn using IntelliJ on Linux into a distinctly non-pleasurable experience.

1. Popups don’t always have focus and sometimes ‘Alt-F1 -> Project & Enter’ does not bring you to the Project panel :/ This is a documented bug; but they put it down to window manager handling. KDE works & GNOME doesn’t. I’m not moving to KDE anytime soon… I’d rather live with this one.

2. Since the last stable releases [5.0.1] my package level tests don’t run. Throwing a null pointer exception somewhere in IntelliJ’s guts trying to configure a classpath.

3. Debugging Tomcat Session can be flaky under Linux – always smooth in Windows.

4. Sometimes you need to focus out and in again for text editing to work.

After all that though, in my opinion there is no alternative to IntelliJ out there for the professional java developer.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005 at 12:19 am and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.