IntelliJ IDEA 10 [u]

Posted by Matt Rajkowski on January 18, 2011, 10:15 AM EST

My favorite IDE reached version 10 in December and I finally got around to downloading a demo of the commercial version. I'm still using a previous commercial version for nearly all of my development projects but I have been using IDEA 10 Community Edition for some of my javascript projects so at least I'll be familiar with some of the UI improvements. What I'm looking forward to in the latest commercial edition:

• Having a current IDE for technologies and frameworks that I work with
• Improvements with source code repositories
• "100% faster code indexing, and an overall performance increase"
• "New code completion behavior with automatic invocation while typing"

UPDATE: Read on for info on my upgrade experience...

Just last week I upgraded from version 8 to version 10. IntelliJ updates are pretty frequent, like yearly, but somehow I had gotten behind. At the first of the year I received a nice email from JetBrains reminding me that there was a new update and that I could upgrade for the same price as if I was upgrading from version 9 – so I did it.

I have been using the Community Edition of JetBrains so I was at least familiar with the new look.

Things I've noticed during my daily use:

• Better Mac OSX integration - tabs function better and the Open File chooser is Mac OSX-like
• Highlighting text in the editor, then choosing "Go to Class or File" uses the selected text (no more copy/paste)
• Word completion is much quicker... as in, as you type quick. I like it.
• Projects seem to load quicker... better background indexing and such.
• My upgraded version 8 projects worked, but with one problem... I had to go dig into the version 8 preference files to retrieve the patches I had shelved and which did not carry forward into 10. I'm glad I looked there before completely removing my version 8 install. The settings for running tests and executing Tomcat all carried forward just fine.
• Tomcat has a new Skull icon to kill the process when Tomcat doesn't shut down properly. A nice touch so I don't have to hit the terminal when Tomcat fails to shutdown.
• SVN performance is the main reason I have upgraded. One of the Subversion servers I use keeps reporting a timeout under version 8, and that issue has mostly gone away in version 10. I say mostly because the Show History window will refresh while the list is being retrieved, so most of the last X changes show before the timeout occurs. SmartSVN doesn't have this issue so I'm not sure, but I suspect it's mainly the subversion server in question. Anyhow, I'm glad it has been improved.
• One interesting feature is a spell checker while you code. I like it, but it does seem to slow down the editor. I'll try configuring the inspections and see if I can disable any.

That touches on the main upgrade and editor usage. I need to review the upgrade notes and see what types of refactorings and plug-ins I should know more about.

Still, IntelliJ is my favorite editor.