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  1. Stackups
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  4. IDE
  5. IntelliJ IDEA vs Light Table

IntelliJ IDEA vs Light Table

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

IntelliJ IDEA
IntelliJ IDEA
Stacks44.0K
Followers36.9K
Votes1.5K
Light Table
Light Table
Stacks2
Followers20
Votes0
GitHub Stars11.7K
Forks916

IntelliJ IDEA vs Light Table: What are the differences?

IntelliJ IDEA: Capable and Ergonomic IDE for JVM. Out of the box, IntelliJ IDEA provides a comprehensive feature set including tools and integrations with the most important modern technologies and frameworks for enterprise and web development with Java, Scala, Groovy and other languages; Light Table: It features real-time feedback allowing instant execution, debugging and access to documentation. It is a new interactive IDE that lets you modify running programs and embed anything from websites to games. It gives real time feedback on the changes you make to your code, and shows how data values flow through your entire program. As such, it doesn't just provide the answers, but instead helps you understand why the answers are what they are.

IntelliJ IDEA and Light Table can be categorized as "Integrated Development Environment" tools.

Some of the features offered by IntelliJ IDEA are:

  • Smart Code Completion
  • On-the-fly Code Analysis
  • Advanced Refactorings

On the other hand, Light Table provides the following key features:

  • Free and open source
  • Cross-platform
  • Lightweight

Light Table is an open source tool with 10.8K GitHub stars and 913 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Light Table's open source repository on GitHub.

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Advice on IntelliJ IDEA, Light Table

christy
christy

Program Manager

Jul 1, 2020

Needs adviceonPythonPythonEclipseEclipseIntelliJ IDEAIntelliJ IDEA

UPDATE: Thanks for the great response. I am going to start with VSCode based on the open source and free version that will allow me to grow into other languages, but not cost me a license ..yet.

I have been working with software development for 12 years, but I am just beginning my journey to learn to code. I am starting with Python following the suggestion of some of my coworkers. They are split between Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA for IDEs that they use and PyCharm is new to me. Which IDE would you suggest for a beginner that will allow expansion to Java, JavaScript, and eventually AngularJS and possibly mobile applications?

2.03M views2.03M
Comments
Manabu
Manabu

CEO, Co-Founder at WinguMD

Jun 13, 2020

Decided

I originally chose IntelliJ over Eclipse, as it was close enough to the look and feel of Visual Studio and we do go back and forth between the two. We really begin to love IntelliJ and their suite of IDEs so we are now using AppCode for the IOS development because the workflow is identical with the IntelliJ. IntelliJ is super complex and intimidating at first but it does afford a lot of nice utilities to get us produce clean code.

551k views551k
Comments
Simon
Simon

Software Engineer at Picnic Technologies

Aug 21, 2020

Review

Notepad++ is insanely simplistic. It doesn't help much with the coding, as it doesn't have stuff like auto-completion. Atom is a great editor for pretty much any language. It has a plugin ide-java to support Java programming. When starting with Java, I would recommend it. But, when becoming even a bit better in the language, I would suggest a more mature IDE like IntelliJ or Eclipse. The refactoring and code manipulation tools make it a lot quicker to program. Only when getting started it might be a bit too much to both learn a language AND learn an IDE. So Atom might be better to get started.

338 views338
Comments

Detailed Comparison

IntelliJ IDEA
IntelliJ IDEA
Light Table
Light Table

Out of the box, IntelliJ IDEA provides a comprehensive feature set including tools and integrations with the most important modern technologies and frameworks for enterprise and web development with Java, Scala, Groovy and other languages.

It is a new interactive IDE that lets you modify running programs and embed anything from websites to games. It gives real time feedback on the changes you make to your code, and shows how data values flow through your entire program. As such, it doesn't just provide the answers, but instead helps you understand why the answers are what they are.

Smart Code Completion;On-the-fly Code Analysis;Advanced Refactorings;Database Tools;UML Designer;Version Control Tools;Build Tools
Free and open source; Cross-platform; Lightweight; Modern, smart UI with minimalist interface; Auto-complete; Inline evaluation; Customizable with themes and plugins; Split views and instant feedback.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
11.7K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
916
Stacks
44.0K
Stacks
2
Followers
36.9K
Followers
20
Votes
1.5K
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 301
    Fantastically intelligent
  • 242
    Best-in-class ide
  • 190
    Many languages support
  • 158
    Java
  • 121
    Fast
Cons
  • 20
    Large footprint required to really enjoy (mem/disc)
  • 16
    Very slow
  • 8
    Bad for beginners
  • 7
    UI is not intuitive
  • 5
    Not nearly as many tools to integrate as vs code
No community feedback yet
Integrations
Java
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript
Node.js
Node.js
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Dreamweaver
Adobe Dreamweaver
Solis
Solis
WakaTime
WakaTime

What are some alternatives to IntelliJ IDEA, Light Table?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

PhpStorm

PhpStorm

PhpStorm is a PHP IDE which keeps up with latest PHP & web languages trends, integrates a variety of modern tools, and brings even more extensibility with support for major PHP frameworks.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a suite of component-based software development tools and other technologies for building powerful, high-performance applications.

WebStorm

WebStorm

WebStorm is a lightweight and intelligent IDE for front-end development and server-side JavaScript.

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE is FREE, open source, and has a worldwide community of users and developers.

PyCharm

PyCharm

PyCharm’s smart code editor provides first-class support for Python, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, CSS, popular template languages and more. Take advantage of language-aware code completion, error detection, and on-the-fly code fixes!

Notepad++

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

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