Pigeon Programming

Intellij 8 continues with "all you need is a space bar and meta combinations to program" functionality: "Pressing Ctrl-Shift-Space twice allows you to find values of the expected types which are "two steps away" (can be retrieved through a chained method call)." It seems to be supporting what I'd consider a code smell.

Intellij Under OSX

Seems that the bug with IntelliJ under OS X 10.5 (Leopard) (works for me now anyway) is fixed in currently nightly builds and will be in 7.0.3. More information here.

A Bunch of IntelliJ Goodness

I've been languishing without perhaps the best plugin of all time for IntelliJ. I mention it to everyone I work with and they said, hey I've come across this plugin that you might be interested in. And it's, ToggleTest. A simple plugin that lets you switch between tests and production code. Never let your hands leave the keyboard again.

Other plugins from the author include the best meta-plugin hot plugin and cruise watcher.

IntelliJ vs Eclipse Deathmatch

For my own reference, I'll put comparisons of Eclipse vs IntelliJ. I didn't like Eclipse because I found setting up projects a pain so it was a bit of a non-starter.

Tom's guide: "Eclipse requires you to save all the time...Eclipse has serious usability issues in graphical diff...Like Word, Eclipse wants to own your files and wants you to make all your changes through it".

It's subject of a recent Slashdot article.

It'd be good to find a comparison of the refactorings that are missing/different in Eclipse. I'm also trying out NetBeans 5 to see what it's like.

Update: An old comparison of Eclipse and IntelliJ and a PDF comparing RefactorIt, Eclipse 3.0 and IntelliJ 4.5. A list of new refactoring in NetBeans. Eclipse 3.2 M4 reproduces many features of Swing and IntelliJ IDEA, one of the threads Is $500 really alot of money?.