NetBeans 8.1 IDE Released With Java Enhancements, HTML5/JS/Node.js Goodies

[Veerappan]

I'll second that jetbrains stuff is awesome, but their licenses are not. I'd have to purchase a license for each machine I use it on. That's a bit extreme, and I won't use it on principle. Also any benefit of it over Netbeans would be negligiable (for me)

Umm, you might want to reread the licensing terms (or maybe I should). I believe that you're allowed to install the IDE on multiple machines, you're just limited to using that IDE on one machine at a time...

[darkbasic]

I won't say Intellij is better

Intellij *is* better.

[Veske]

Just use Intellij. It's the superior option.

[eggbert]

Umm, you might want to reread the licensing terms (or maybe I should). I believe that you're allowed to install the IDE on multiple machines, you're just limited to using that IDE on one machine at a time...

I stand corrected. Although I could have sworn the last time I looked at their licensing it required a separate license for each machine.

[ua=42]

I prefer netbeans to eclipse. It has working git support. (Yes, I have used the git plugin for eclipse... it sucks.)

[darkbasic]

I prefer netbeans to eclipse.

+1 (stupid char limit)

[Delgarde]

I'll take it over eclipse any day of the week. We work pretty extensively with maven projects at my employer, and eclipse's maven support gives me headaches.

I still prefer Eclipse personally, but I know what you mean... I've not used NetBeans much, but from what I've seen, the Maven support is much better integrated than in Eclipse. The new javascript stuff sounds promising too...

[bug77]

I'll take it over eclipse any day of the week. We work pretty extensively with maven projects at my employer, and eclipse's maven support gives me headaches.

I'll admit that IntelliJ IDEA is pretty awesome, and plenty of the people here use it, but I haven't decided to make the jump yet.

I'm assuming that those were the 3 that you were thinking of... ?

You are correct.
And you have correctly noticed Eclipse's strength is also its weakness: while it does have a ton of plugins, it only takes a single bad one to bring down the whole thing. The Maven plugin is one prime example, but I'm used to work with Maven through the CLI; the same goes for version control, but that's still useful to have in the IDE, mainly for diffs. Netbeans on the other hand doesn't have as many plugins and it does have some annoying limitations like not being able to search by capital letters (In 2015? Wth?). Netbeans also seems to be the slowest of the bunch. (About 10 seconds to scan a dozen smallish projects at startup? On a SSD? Really?)

Idea (with its awesome code analyzer) takes the cake though. And it also includes several smaller niceties, like showing variable values eight in the code when debugging, letting you know when there's a plugin that can handle some file you've just opened, nice support for Scala and Gradle (though not perfect yet). In my experience it's the IDE that gets the least in your way. Yes, it costs about $200 for a personal license, but let's be honest here, we make that kind of money in a couple of days or so.

Edit: And just got bitten again: while 8.1 is out, my 8.1 Development Version still won't update to the final build. It just tells me that my IDE is up-to-date.

[wodencafe]

I hate Eclipse, but I use it anyway. It's slow, and crashes fairly often, but it is extremely versatile and the only thing we can get to work with our funky-ass legacy projects.