I used to use a regular text editor for writing Java, after having tried or used Visual Studio, Visual Cafe, JBuilder, Supercede, etc. in the past and found them not worth the inertia of starting and editing with them. But I tried IntelliJ IDEA after some co-workers started raving about it, and I will never go back. It does so many cool things that I feel totally unproductive without it now. Refactorings, good search and replace, CVS integration, Ant integration, JUnit integration, code reformatting, key bindings for every command as a rule (good for the kings of the keyboard), alternate key bindings (Emacs, others), continuous code analysis (highlight unused variables, etc.), smart XML and JSP editing, easily debug code running on your app server, etc. And it is easy to do all this stuff. Sure, it is possible to do some of these things with other editing systems, but IDEA makes it easy and does things smartly (it knows which 'i's in the current file are really the variable you want to rename, rather than replacing every 'i' in the file). Being able to do something easily is often the difference between doing it and not doing it -- IDEA empowers you by making lots of useful things easy to do. Rename a class and it will remove the file from CVS, add it under its new name, update all references to the file, etc. with just a few clicks (or key presses). It is pure Java, so you can use it on any platform. I won't lie -- it can be slow sometimes -- but unlike other IDEs I have tried, the features it offers far outweigh the performance disadvantage versus a native text editor. And even though it can be slow sometimes, I don't really find myself waiting for it very often (besides startup). We have people around the office using it on 466 Celeron systems, so I guess it is fast enough.
The IntelliJ IDEA motto is "Develop with Pleasure" and they certainly deliver on that promise. I am not affiliated with IntelliJ in any way other than loving their IDEA product. If it sounds like something you might like, download an evaluation version and give it a try: http://www.intellij.com/idea/download.jsp -Max -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
