A week with IntelliJ 10.5 May 3, 2011

In the past, I've been very critical of IntelliJ.  But I'm always willing to try things again...

At the Functional Programming Exchange in London, Jason Zaug was kind enough to install and configure IntelliJ 10.5 (an early access release) on my computer.  He installed the Scala plugin and did some chicken sacrificing over the keyboard and handing some configurations to optimize my Scala coding experience with IntelliJ.

I've spent nearly a week with IntelliJ.  I am currently working on a mixed Scala and Java project and navigating the Java class hierarchy is non-trivial, so having IntelliJ's code navigation tools as well as method name completion is a real time saver.

While I still don't like IntelliJ's keyboard layout (even it's mock Emacs key mode), IntelliJ's now a superior development environment for me.  It's better than Emacs with Ensime.  It's solid and reasonably quick (although, I do have the latest, fastest Intel i7 Sandy Bridge chips in my machine).

So, I officially recommend IntelliJ 10.5 and the Scala plugin for doing Scala coding.  The IntelliJ team has done a great job of making IntelliJ and the Scala plugin better and better.

And if I have to eat my hat to make up for past reviews of IntelliJ, I'll be happy to.

Rock on.