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

Question

I have heard from people who swear by one or the other. Both are full-featured, excellent IDEs. But each has slightly different strengths. This is not meant to turn into a holy IDE war. Please downvote any flamebait answers. Thanks.

This is the analog of this question.

Answer 1

A working subversion integration, have a look at the bugs of the idea subversion plugin.

Answer 2

Only eclipse allows you to step through an ant build in the debugger.

Answer 3

As far as I know there is no alternative to eclipse's excellent Mylyn task plugin in IntelliJ.

Answer 4

The biggest annoyance I've found (using both) is that in Eclipse I can create Ant Launch tasks. These tasks allow me to run the same ant task in the same build file using different sets of properties/arguments without editing each time.

In IDEA, properties are set across the entire build file. So not only can you not run the same ant task with different properties without editing, but you can't run different ant tasks with different properties unless they are in different build files.

Answer 5

Idea has no drools plugin and external editors (like excel) are hard to integrate.

Answer 6

My favourite small annoyance in idea (and favourite small feature in eclipse) is the positioning of the character when typing an opening curly brace (e.g. "{") or a semicolon. You'll have to enable it in eclipse (Window/Preferences/Java/Editor/Typing: "Automatically insert at correct position: Semicolon, Braces")

With this just type ahead ("|" is the caret position)

while(|

results (no magic yet) in

while(|)

now type true{, results in

while(true) {|

So simple, yet so powerful.

Also, in (e.g.)

System.out.println("Hello world")

with the caret anywhere in that line, typing a semicolon will automagically type it at the end of the line. Backspace corrects, just like the usual autocorrection in your favourite wordprocessor.

Priceless. I'm physically no longer able to type a semicolon at the correct position on first try :)

Answer 7

In eclipse it is possible to get annoyed by making a 10x10 editing area ( cols/row ) and see all the other windows at the same time.

In IntelliJ this in not possible since the 'ESC' key will close them all.

Ok, ok, I'm sorry I have to do it, shoot me now

Answer 8

The open nature of Eclipse platform makes thrive the plugin writers community. There are tons of plugins available for all kind of tasks.

Answer 9

In eclipse you can maximize the editor and in IntelliJ you can click escape, which is similar functionality. But in eclipse you can restore. There's no equivalent "un-maximize" in IntelliJ which is even more frustrating.

Answer 10

My favorite Eclipse features:

• AspectJ integration that includes navigation between aspects and the code, annotation markers showing where aspects are applied, cross reference view, common open typed dialog showing aspect types (recently added)
• OSGi tooling (aka PDE), editing and optimizing OSGI manifest, refactorings specific to OSGi and declarative services editor (currently in the works)

Answer 11

Since Eclipse 3.3 (but it can be done before using a plugin), you can automatically execute actions while saving a Java file:

• organize imports
• format source code
• some other actions (like adding annotations, removing unnecessary casts...)

This can be configured in Preferences > Java > Editor > Save actions.