As I was adding a new post today, I noticed an old post of mine that I had migrated from my old blog to this one about using IntelliJ and comparing it with STS. It’s a little over 2 years old and in it I make the statement “STS which is based on Eclipse, which I consider to be the premier Java IDE”;.

At the time, I was just starting my new job after 7 years with a large company where I primarily used Eclipse as my development tool on vanilla Java projects. And though I did really Eclipse at the time and was frustrated for quite a while with IntelliJ’s performance, I have to clarify that it’s is not my stance anymore.

Here’s the thing, I haven’t used Eclipse or STS for more than ~3mins in the last 2 1/2 years, so I cannot personally attest to its performance or usability. However, in the last 2 1/2 years, IntelliJ (I started with version 9 and am now using the 13 EAP) has come a long way. it’s performance is dramatically better. I’m faster using it now and I love the improvements with respect to Gradle integration they’ve been bringing in.

I’m not going to promote one over the other like I said because I don’t have enough usage of Eclipse recently to make a comparison and don’t really have the time or desire to look at it any time soon. So I’ll just leave it at that.