IDE Favorite Features Comparison (VS/Eclipse/IntelliJ/Others...)

Question

I've been a Microsoft developer since VB 3, and always considered Microsoft development tools to be the best on the market. However, having used Eclipse for Java development over the last few months, I can see a lot of features that are missing in VS 2008 IDE. Yet I can't find any that I can't find alternatives for in Eclipse. Seems that Visual Studio is falling behind quite a bit.

What are people's favorite IDE features across multiple IDEs, and what are the workarounds for the missing ones.

I saw a few threads here already, but none of them touch on Visual Studio.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/239732/things-possible-in-intellij-that-arent-possible-in-eclipse

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/54886/hidden-tricks-for-eclipse

Answer 1

In Delphi, you can customize your code-completion templates, so I could (for example) set it up so I could type

tryf

Then push Ctrl+J, and it will translate that into

try

finally

end;

But they are totally customizable, so you can configure (for example) a general database connection, and type MyDatabaseConnection, push Ctrl+J and get a full block of code yielding a db connection.

Answer 2

Another one from Delphi, that I miss in VS2008 all the time:

You can navigate the properties page with the keyboard. So I can (for example) type "Nam" and it will jump to the "Name" property on the page. Anything that keeps my hands on the keyboard is welcome.

Answer 3

Same functionality is available in Eclipse. Options window has a type in that will show all pages that are related to a typed keyword.

Answer 4

Not vanilla Visual Studio, but check out the Resharper add-in - I think it's worth the money.

Answer 5

vi keybindings is the feature I am the most attached to, or that I misses the most.

My main IDE is of course vim. And there are several tricks to get vim to interact nicely with Visual Studio, Eclipse, ....

• http://www.viemu.com/ : run a vi clone as visual studio editor (not that good)
• http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=864 : control visual studio from vim
• http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Integrate_gvim_with_Visual_Studio : edit in vim from visual studio

Most of the tricks are also available for other IDE (netbeans, Eclipse, ...)

Answer 6

It seems really minor, but IntelliJ has this option where you can have faint gray lines between your methods. That tiny feature helps my visual comprehension of the code in a huge way.

JetBrains in general just has a great approach to usability that I greatly appreciate.

Answer 7

I've only used VS from ye-gads-that-was-a-long-time-ago to present, but recently was asked by an associate to work on a Java contract and so installed Netbeans. I like the built-in refactoring, local history and source control integration and the plug-in system is absolutely brilliant.

To be honest, though, both are such a far cry from the sorts of tools I started out with in the late 70's a modern IDE would have to be doing something seriously wrong to disappoint!

Answer 8

Eclipse's Quick Fix. Control-1; Command-1 on Mac OS. Whatever's wrong with my code here at the cursor - please fix it for me, IDE! Thanks!

Even when nothing's broken, Eclipse will fix it. Like Assign Parameter To New Field, for instance. Quick Fix is a fantastic timesaver.

Answer 9

I use Codelobster PHP Edition. It has Microsoft Visual Studio interface and any plug-ins for most popular frameworks.

Answer 10

A priceless feature of Eclipse, that has been implemented in VS, and I think in NetBeans 6.5 (IntelliJ also has it, I don't know since when) is the Call hierarcy.

This feature shows what methods are called by what other methods (and vice versa), which is priceless when having to work with large codebases and tracing the flow through the code.

Answer 11

Intellij have really polished features while missing something (at least that I know) like mylin that is a great task manager available in eclipse. In simple word I could say that Intellij Is wayy better than the current eclipse (eclipse 3.6) for editing code, its refactoring tools, code autocompletion (netbeans is really good at it too), jsp code completion... and the best and something I have never before seen anywhere else: JAVASCRIPT CODE ASSISTANCE <----- almost perfect (haven't tried too much in netbeans and in eclipse is useless).