opencomponentry

I’ll try to keep this one short, partly because it’s a little redundant feeling and partly because I’m a little embarrassed that it took me so long to figure it out..

Eclipse is now sadly – dead to me. I only have eyes for IDEA. As promised though, I’ll try and leave out the redundant and focus only on the biggest selling point for me. It lets me use my keyboard.

But all IDE’s let you use your keyboard right? Wrong. Before finally converting over to eclipse I spent the majority of my programming life in another little editor called “Emacs”. While living in that world my mouse was hardly ever used except for doing non work related things like browse the internet or play video games. I mean my hands and mind were fused as one being – I thought it and it just “happened”.

The only thing that eventually got me to use eclipse was that those thoughts involving “refactoring” / changing a class name / method name / etc weren’t exactly a fusion of mind and keyboard. Really they were painful thoughts best avoided if at all possible.

Not so with IDEA! Not only does it actually provide a rich keyboard programming experience in all the places where it makes sense, it actually constantly badgers you with hints and dialogs about how you could be doing all of these things with your keyboard instead:

To be honest I don’t think I even realized how much more of my keyboard I was naturally starting to use until I had to go back to eclipse for a different project. My fingers immediately started whining “what do we do what do we do? oh f@#…fine…use the mouse..”

If you are an old Emacs hack using java you really don’t have many good excuses to not be using IDEA if you are currently using eclipse. (maybe? wouldn’t be surprised if there were still better choices but it’s working for me for now..)