Terse Systems : Why IntelliJ IDEA sucks

Why IntelliJ IDEA sucks 57

Posted by wsargent Sun, 27 Feb 2005 02:25:00 GMT

I really wanted to like IntelliJ IDEA. I had heard great things about it, heard people talk about the featureset and approach that IDEA had that made it superior to Eclipse. I loved the JSP support in IDEA, and hoped that it would translate into the rest of the system.

I had trouble understanding IDEA’s IDE, but I put it down to inexperience and a mindset based on Eclipse. I didn’t like the way that IDEA managed projects. I didn’t like that I couldn’t open up two projects inside a single frame, or that when I created multi-module projects, it assumed that I wanted the modules in different directories. I didn’t like the amount of time it took to open a project, even when it had already been parsed. But I bumped up the heap size, tweaked some VM parameters and I was generally okay with it.

Going into the IDE itself was an educational experience. From the first glance, it was obvious that Eclipse’s features have been copied from IDEA. This isn’t bad in itself. I’m willing to bet that much of IDEA was copied from JBuilder. However, it had the effect of pitting Eclipse’s feature set directly against IDEA. Most of the time, Eclipse wins.

Eclipse wins because IBM had time to sit back and think about how to present a coherent UI. It had time to think about what developers did and did not want to see. It noted carefully what developers do not want to think about. And it didn’t even have to try that hard, because IDEA has some of the most cack-handed, bone-headed UI decisions I’ve ever seen.

Take completion. Completion is the anticipation of programmer’s thought. When I hit a completion key, I’m effectively asking the IDE “What do you want to go here?” I want a best guess at all the possible options. It’s a long time HCI practice. Unix shells, Apple GUIs, and even Google all use completion in some form or another. But I can’t do this in IDEA.

Because IDEA has three different code completion methods, all with different keystrokes.

There’s Basic (Ctrl-Space). There’s Smart Type (Ctrl-Shift-Space). And there’s Class Type (Ctrl-Alt-Space). I’ve never seen anything like it. I can’t understand how an IDE can be smart enough to introspect all the information in the system and too dumb to figure out how to merge that information into a single list.

Templates is another system entirely. If you want to complete out a template, it’s Ctrl-J (or Tab, if you’ve typed it out first). If you select a block of code and try to surround it in a live template using Ctrl-J, it shows the normal templates. It thinks that I want to replace 150 lines of code with a for loop instead of wrapping it in a transaction demarcation. If I want to surround with a live template, it’s Ctrl-Alt-T. Ctrl-Alt-J also does a surround with template, but I’m still not sure exactly what the difference is. Live templates are fun, but must be distinguished from normal templates, and are lacking in variables (notably, you can insert the methodName into a live template, but there’s no way to insert the method arguments as a param).

Not only that, but the awareness of context is weak compared to Eclipse. There’s no way to filter out classes you’re not interested in. If you had to use a com.sun.* tool, then you are provided with Sun classes, whether you want them to show up in completion or not. Hit completion inside a method call like this: string.getBytes() and it will show you the possible options only if you haven’t typed anything in there. If you want to see the possible parameters to that method call when it’s already been filled in? Ctrl-P. How intuitively obvious.

This weakness of context applies all the way through IDEA. When the cursor is on a class and I right click on it, I want to see refactoring operations that are specific to that class. When I’m on a method, I want to see operations specific to that method. IDEA gleefully ignores this idea altogether. IDEA has so little clue it even asks me if I want to apply Java refactoring to JSP pages.

Then there are the obvious misses. I can’t bind “Generate Getter & Setter” to a keystroke. Instead, I have to hit Alt-Insert, and pick it out from a list of “Generate” options. This is not a casual complaint – most of the code I write has to use javabeans in an IoC framework. I can’t even edit the getter and setter bodies from the generator.

If I want to generate a new class? There’s a class generation dialog, but it just has the name. I can’t pick out the package, interfaces and have the superclass constructors generated for me. It’s by hand, using the “Class Type” completion and the Generate box.

If I want to search for a class? Ctrl-N, but no! I have to hit the little checkbox that indicates I want to search for a class outside my project! It’s really Ctrl-N, Alt-N, for that special Emacs feeling. Plus the classes I’d like filtered out, because I’m not interested in the latest Xalan implementation.

Want to search for usages of a class? I want to search through Projects and Libraries on most of my classes. And the “Libraries” section is over 25 MB of classes. IDEA will do a linear search through every file I have the first time I call this method. Enough time for me to break for a coffee. It’s so pitiful it’s embarrassing.

Want to create a new method? Have a variable called foo and you’re typing “getF”? Want to override a method from a superclass? You’re typing a method with four parameters, all of which can be guessed from context, and you want the IDE to fill it out for you? Good luck with that. Ctrl-space will do nothing. You’ll have to figure your own way out with the appropriate keystroke. (For the impatient, implement method and override method will do some of it, but only from a dialog box.)

And then there’s the intention actions. This works exactly the same way it does in Eclipse, so I don’t see anything to scream about. I hit Alt-Enter in IDEA, I hit Ctrl-1 in Eclipse. Except that if I have a method like this

public String getFoo() { ... }

public void doNothing() {
   getFoo();
}

And I try to hit Alt-Enter in IDEA with the cursor on getFoo(), nothing happens. I have to specifically introduce a variable, which is Ctrl-Alt-V. Whereas Eclipse will figure out from context where I am and what I want to do.

I’ve seen nothing in the core Java editor that makes me want to use it. The plugins, by and large, are useless (don’t even get me started on the Subversion or Perforce integrations) and the UI (pure Java though it is) is only just barely past jEdit. I don’t care about the GUI builder, generics support, or AOP support.

I like the way that javabean properties are handled in the outline pane. I like the “Analyse Code” feature (although I prefer PMD, quite frankly). I like the JSP editor. I like that IDEA will detect javadoc @params that don’t exist in the method (although I’ve since discovered that Eclipse 3.1 can also do this). I like the way it treats J2EE applications as submodules of the main project.

But it’s not like IDEA is reading my mind. It’s more like I’m trying to read IDEA’s mind. I spend half of my time on IDEA trying to get it to do things for me that it should be smart enough to do for me automatically. And worse, it doesn’t do anything significantly better than Eclipse and its associated plugins.

So farewell, IDEA. You were a good learning experience, but about as useful to my everyday job as that two week vacation I wasted learning Ruby.

EDIT: also see here on Jon Eave’s site.

EDIT 2: Also at Software is too expensive to build cheaply…

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Why IntelliJ IDEA sucks 57

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