Jun 22, 2022
When I work with Java, I use IntelliJ IDEA. When I want super-b Refactoring and Search/Replace Functionality, I use IntelliJ.
When working on anything else, I've chosen to adopt Visual Studio Code - a IDE that implements many features important and interesting to the developer experience and doesn't make me miss many things from Jetbrains while being so lightweight that I install it everywhere, even when I would've just wanted to install Notepad++.
I install it everywhere, and if it's my machine, I sign into my GitHub Account to sync all Extensions and Settings and unlock all GitHub seamlessness-capabilities.
The browser-only capability is awesome and allows for extremely seamless and fast ad-hoc development from anywhere just by signing in to GitHub.
I only really use the GUI/Side-Bar Tools "Project Manager", "GitLens", "Git Graph" and "Git History". But i do have installed many other Developer Experience changing extensions as well. For the interested, you can take a look at my VS Code Extensions I documented over at my GitHub
[Addendum 2022/08] I recently found out about that VSCode also has Live Share Extension, similiar to the one Jetbrains added in one of the newer versions. Very neat and nicely implemented over SSH too. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/liveshare/
My Jetbrains History:
IntelliJ is an awesome tool. It does everything for you, without even noticing - i.e. automatic Gradle dependency installation or adding Gradle dependencies through GUI.
I really got to use most Shortcuts and enjoyed the Weekly Tips.
I can't emphasize enough how well it's Quick Fixes and Refactoring work.
It allows you to generate all kinds of boilerplate (e.g. Getter/Setter/Constructor, toString, JavaDoc). It has a ByteCode Previewer. It has an awesome Debugger.
Also: During my 4 years in apprentice as an IT-Technician in which I also worked on some Grails (Spring) Projects it also was nice that IntelliJ IDEA ULTIMATE, which I got for free thanks to an all-time available offer for students, had Grails-aware functionality. The primary functionality I'm talking about is the ability to automatically generate a graphical database diagram for by a click on the Domain Class. Experimenting with this I quickly understood all the Relation Database Paradigms and how to implement them with GORM, or how GORM translates to database through IntelliJ's Database Tab Integration.
