Things possible in Eclipse that aren’t possible in

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

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 2

I've summed up my comparison of Eclipse 3.6 and IntelliJ 10.5 in a blog (focused more on what I like in II or miss there compared to Eclipse)

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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 5

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 6

I tried to switch to IntelliJ because of the new Android Studio. But I'm very disappointed now. I'm using Eclipse with the Code Recommenders Plugin. Here is a simple example why Eclipse is so awesome:

I want to create a new SimpleTimeZone. SimpleTimeZone has no Constructor with zero arguments.

Ctrl + Space in Eclipse

Ctrl + Space in IntelliJ

In IntelliJ I get no informations what kind of constructors SimpleTimeZone has.

After Enter in Eclipse

I get the previously selected constructor filled with predefined variable names. And I can see the type of every argument. With Code Recommenders Eclipse guesses the right constructor by the previously defined variable types in the current scope and fills the constructor with these vars.

After Enter in IntelliJ nothing happens. I get an empty constructor. I have to press Ctrl + P to see the expected arguments.

or try something simple. Type

syso<Ctrl+Space>

Eclipse: System.out.println()

IntelliJ: syso