Intellij has become a dog

[epicwinter]

I use to use intellij back in the 3.0x days (the glory days). It was
the most amazing ide i have ever used. I finally got to play with the
new versions and I feel like the completely ruined it. They changed
the gui and I don't think it is nearly as nice. But my biggest issue
is that it is slow. It seems like it got tremendously slower. I
don't understand how they could have taken such a giant step
backwards. I am sure it is due to feature bloat but it is really
disappointing. Has anyone else experienced this?

 

[Daniel Dyer]

I use to use intellij back in the 3.0x days (the glory days). It was
the most amazing ide i have ever used. I finally got to play with the
new versions and I feel like the completely ruined it. They changed
the gui and I don't think it is nearly as nice. But my biggest issue
is that it is slow. It seems like it got tremendously slower. I
don't understand how they could have taken such a giant step
backwards. I am sure it is due to feature bloat but it is really
disappointing. Has anyone else experienced this?

It uses a lot of RAM (but then so does Eclipse), if you've got plenty of
physical memory then it's not too bad. Performance on my Mac at home is
fine, it's occasionally sluggish on my Windows PC at work, but then that
runs more stuff. Both have 1Gb of RAM.

If you're on Windows, this performance tweak might be useful:

http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2006/12/boosting-intellij-idea-performance-on-windows-systems/

You can also tweak the VM start-up options to improve performace.
Incremental garbage collection is one option that might improve things.

My main complaint is that the 6.0 series of releases have been extremely
buggy. 6.0.4 is the first one that is really usable but there are still
some issues, the most significant being that it can crash editing complex
Ant build files.

Despite the flaws, I still think IDEA is the best option available and
probably will be for a while yet.

Dan.

 

[Daniel Pitts]

I use to use intellij back in the 3.0x days (the glory days). It was
the most amazing ide i have ever used. I finally got to play with the
new versions and I feel like the completely ruined it. They changed
the gui and I don't think it is nearly as nice. But my biggest issue
is that it is slow. It seems like it got tremendously slower. I
don't understand how they could have taken such a giant step
backwards. I am sure it is due to feature bloat but it is really
disappointing. Has anyone else experienced this?

Its a little bit of feature creep. However, I think Idea 5.0 (with
support for Generics) is a indispensable. I use the refactoring
capabilities constantly. I didn't use it much in the "3.0" days, so I
can't really compare its features, but I can agree that there are some
performance "issues" with idea 5.0 and 6.0. Thing we do here where I
work, is (through ant) remove and update our libraries. When we do
this, IDEA "flashes" for a few minutes, trying to cope with some many
altered .jar files.

But, I can honestly say, I love developing with Idea. I've tried going
back to VI, but ouch, when I can't invoke "Introduce Variable (ctrl-
alt-v)", I get discouraged quickly.

 

[Christopher Benson-Manica]

I use to use intellij back in the 3.0x days (the glory days).

I was still in college in those days

the gui and I don't think it is nearly as nice. But my biggest issue
is that it is slow. It seems like it got tremendously slower.

Having not been around in the "fast" days, I can't make a comparison.
I do think IntelliJ occasionally bogs down doing mysterious
incomprehensible things, but barely long enough to do a little web
surfing while you wait. I'd be interested to hear what kind of
hardware you're using - I'm sure it's true that, as with nearly all
things, the hardware requirements to run IntelliJ smoothly have
increased. I run on a 2.0G laptop with 1GB of RAM without significant
problems, although a coworker with a similar machine finds it to be
too slow for his tastes and uses VIM (!) instead. Feature bloat is
always a problem, but I do believe that most of IntelliJ's features
can be genuinely useful and timesaving, and I'm willing to pay a small
performance price for more of them.

 

[Roedy Green]

I am using it with 1 GIG and it is ok. I was using .5 gig and it was
a pig. The big problem I have now is the Vista indexer kicking in to
aggressively and dragging things down. I think the fool thing tries
to index temp files.

 

[epicwinter]

Good to hear the replies. I am just frustrated. I still use the old
3 version but it is getting a little ridiculous because I have to use
jdk 1.4 with it and that is holding some things back as you can
guess. I just write code so much faster on 3.

I used to use the 3.0 on my linux dual pentium 3 800 mhz processor
machine with 768 memory and it screamed. But there isn't a chance of
running 6.0 on that. On my windows notebook i have better luck but I
still find it to be a complete dog. It has 1gig of memory, a 256 meg
video card, a pentium m 1.3 chip. It is just a shame how much of
stark contrast there is between 3.0 and 6.0 on either machine in terms
of speed. From my perspective the core features in 3 were all i
need. I think these IDEs are trying to become to complete. I don't
need it managing all my resources outside of my application. I wish
they would just focus on the coding side and do that well. Having the
features I use 90% be super fast is more important than even having
that other 10% of the features. I just feel like they ruined the
perfect ide. If you have never tried 3.x you can still download it on
their site. Give it a try it will blow your mind how fast it is.

I can only imagine what kind of hardware people are going to need to
run intellij 6.x with windows vista. You can barely run vista without
2 gigs of ram i think you will need at least 3 to develop on it,
preferable 4.

 

[fy4.net]

I use to use intellij back in the 3.0x days (the glory days). It was
the most amazing ide i have ever used. I finally got to play with the
new versions and I feel like the completely ruined it. They changed
the gui and I don't think it is nearly as nice. But my biggest issue
is that it is slow. It seems like it got tremendously slower. I
don't understand how they could have taken such a giant step
backwards. I am sure it is due to feature bloat but it is really
disappointing. Has anyone else experienced this?

More see here!
http://www.flash50.com/index.php

 

[Christopher Benson-Manica]

Good to hear the replies. I am just frustrated. I still use the old
3 version but it is getting a little ridiculous because I have to use
jdk 1.4 with it and that is holding some things back as you can
guess. I just write code so much faster on 3.

Maybe a possible solution would be to somehow separate all the
little-used goodies into plugins that could be installed only if the
user wanted them. The situation does bring to mind the divergence
between two certain text editors (I'm a vim person and hate emacs,
generally, for reasons similar to your dislike of Intellij 6.)

 

[epicwinter]

Maybe a possible solution would be to somehow separate all the
little-used goodies into plugins that could be installed only if the
user wanted them. The situation does bring to mind the divergence
between two certain text editors (I'm a vim person and hate emacs,
generally, for reasons similar to your dislike of Intellij 6.)

Possible. One thing that really shocked me was how they changed the
ui so much. It just seems like they did a full rewrite at some point
probably just so they could accomodate some new feature and now the
whole thing is a mess.