A Plea to JetBrains
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I'm back doing some Java work at the moment and although coding in Java feels somewhat like trying to speak with a mouthful of peanuts—compared with Ruby—I'm rather enjoying it for some perverse reason. That said, my long-time trusty steed in such endevours is really beginning to annoy me. IntelliJ, once the lean, mean, IDE has porked out considerably over the last few releases. It seems that in competing with Eclipse, it is becoming Eclipse: fat, bloated and slow.
IntelliJ has become a bit like Micro$oft Word: I only ever use 5% of the features—and that's just the features of which I'm actually aware; I'm beginning to need the 2GB of RAM in my laptop just for IntelliJ; oh, and SVN+SSH integration just plain sucks. I'll be sticking with the command-line version thank you very much.
It's all very well and good to have all these nifty tools, etc. in the IDE but seriously, I never use them. Nor, for that matter, do I want to get into the habit of doing so for one simple reason: I have command-line build tools so that I may run the build on any machine, at any time of the day, even *gasp* when there is no IDE involved nor a programmer to be found.
So here's a plea to JetBrains: I paid good money for your software and I'll be more than happy to continue paying good money if you'll please oh please let me turn off all those features that make me feel more like I'm using WSAD.
What's next, Perspectives? Gadzeeks!
Comments
you can disable some of the crap via the plugins manager, but alas, not all.
Posted by: peter royal | July 11, 2006 11:36 AM
Yeah, disabled pretty much all the plugins I could but sadly that's not nearly enough. Oh well.
Posted by: Simon Harris![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.redhillconsulting.com.au/blogs/simon/nav-commenters.gif)
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July 11, 2006 11:40 AM
Perspectives are the *exact* solution to your problem, not sure why you're rejecting them...
Posted by: x | July 12, 2006 03:21 AM
I didn't intend for this to become a flame war but, Eclipse is fat, bloated and slow whether I'm in the debug perspective or not. Perspectives are *exactly* what i don't need. I like having all the functionality in one "Perspective". I don't mentally change to "Team" mode just because I want to check out some code. It's a personal thing but Perspectives just don't fit my mental model for development.
Rant aside, the problem is not one of hiding functionality, it's the fact that the functionality even exists in the first place, consuming memory, increasing startup times, etc. If all that functionality were delivered as plugins then I could quite easily remove it altogether.
Posted by: Simon Harris![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.redhillconsulting.com.au/blogs/simon/nav-commenters.gif)
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July 12, 2006 08:28 AM
If you are saying that IntelliJ has all these features but they are all loaded even if you don't need them, then it's becoming much worse than Eclipse. You don't pay for what you don't use in Eclipse since everything is a plug-in that is loaded lazily.
And the fact that IntelliJ doesn't support perspectives is definitely going to become an issue as it becomes more and more bloated, as the IDEA guys (and yourself) are now beginning to realize.
Posted by: x | July 12, 2006 09:04 AM
I will agree with you on one point: the Eclipse plugin model does allow you to remove unwanted features and it would be nice if IntelliJ allowed me to do the same.
Posted by: Simon Harris![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.redhillconsulting.com.au/blogs/simon/nav-commenters.gif)
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July 12, 2006 09:17 AM
Would be nice to have more stuff plugable. What tends to annoy me is not all the extras but the speed. As soon as the files get large idea tends to have these annoying little pauses. If they could remove those pauses I'd be happy. I suspect a lot of it is to do with garbage collection. You tend to see the memory climb and fall rapidly on larger files suggesting a lot of object creation is going on.
Wouldn't it be nice to see a whole release cycle focusing on speed improvements and small incremental tweaks to the existing features.
Posted by: Glen Stampoultzis | July 12, 2006 02:46 PM
Could you please name some of the features that you would like to turn off?
Posted by: Dmitry Jemerov | August 30, 2006 07:03 PM