User Experience Engineering

IntelliJ IDEA - JetBrains "Send Your Feedback"

Are you generally satisfied with IntelliJ IDEA? How do you rate the product?

Yes. 7 out of 10

What features appear most useful?

Ability to parse, format, and refactor JavaScript. JavaScript JSLint, JSHint, and autocomplete.

Better than WebStorm for me, because I need to do likewise with Java files.

Are there any problems?

CPU Hogging

Priority 1, Severity High: CPU usage climbs to 300% when the IDE is not doing much of anything (no editing in progress).
I have read many bug reports and message boards about this (some sources of this behavior fixed). I have updated the application frequently. Still happens frequently. I suspect there is some endless recursion having to do with file indexing and/OR compiling. Notably, the four developers within earshot of me have only one application that regularly makes their CPU fans go berserk.

"Move Line" Munges Code

Move Line Up (Down) is trying to be too smart, sometimes dragging comments and other unselected lines with it. Eclipse does this as I would expect.

Repository Unavailable? Development Blocked. 

Start up IntelliJ IDEA when the repository is not available (no wifi, vendor site down, etc). I would expect to be able to edit code immediately. IDEA churns, and hogs the CPU, and throws up a Wait cursor.

Priority 3:

Version Control Awkwardness

SVN version control is not very granular or easy to follow. In Eclipse, the results of a sync or diff are obvious; the corresponding panel opens. IntelliJ IDEA will report "Synchronize Finished" in the status bar, and not show me the results. The user then must infer whether to open Version Control or Changes Views, and what to do there. Selecting a Directory context menu / Synchronize seems to produce a synch list for the whole workspace, instead of that module.

Resource hogging.

25453 myUserName IntelliJ IDEA 1.5 69 1.25 GB 1.53 GB Intel (64 bit) 2:11:07.17 No

Are there any features you'd like to have but did not find in IntelliJ IDEA?

Indexer > "Ignore Files"

Right-click and tell the indexer exclude certain directories. Without this, "Open File" produces compiled class files, copies of js files, and other resource copies. This makes the index larger, slower, and presents opportunities to edit the wrong copy of a file. Similar to SVN Ignore, this feature would match patterns or individual files/directories.

Resolve JavaScript References in other files

Ability to resolve JavaScript resources, given a path, a list of files, an ANT concat target, etc.

Show whitespace characters when selected

Sublime Text 2, instead of the preference hide/show whitespace, will show whitespace only when it is highlighted (selected). Very useful and subtle, and non-distracting, IMO.

Built-in keymap for Mac OS X Eclipse

Both Webstorm and IDEA lack this. You can get an Open-Source XML file and configure it (in different places for those two IDEs). Seems like this should be included, like the Windows one.