Benefits of moving from Eclipse to IntelliJ IDEA for Android development

Question

I use Eclipse to develop Android and have no problems with it (I also use it to develop web services and C ++ for Linux), but I want to give IntelliJ IDEA the opportunity, as it has favorable reviews, It’s easy, maybe Now that IDEA 10 is released with Android support in Community Edition.

I looked at IDEA and it looks very good to me, and the only drawback is the lack of an interface for editing the .xml file (for example, AndroidManifest.xml) and the user interface builder with ADT 9.0.

Does anyone have any experience they can share with IntelliJ IDEA and Android development?

EDIT: Thanks to everyone; I stick with Eclipse as I know it pretty well and it allows me to do anything (Java related) that I like for free. I should not look like a gift horse in my mouth!

Answer 1

I used both, they are not so different. Many of them are what you are used to. Personally, if you have no problems with Eclipse, I would not suggest switching. There are no benefits that are worth the learning curve.

Answer 2

The only advantage for me: you code as fast as formula 1 :). Indeed. If you use Resharper in .NET programming, you will code as fast as in .NET. Even faster.

The bad thing: the lack of some Eclipse tools (a review of my questions ), and it seems that the Eclipse compiler - which you can use from IntelliJ as well - is better. Due to the lack of some tools, you are forced to use many third-party tools.

The bottom line: if you have no problems with Eclipse, then stick with it. I hated the eclipse of Eclipse and why I moved to IntelliJ.

EDIT January 23, 2013

IntelliJ has improved a lot . Now they have a visual UI editor, an excellent connection to the Android SDK, and at the moment I can’t think of any function that Eclipse and IDEA do not have. What's even better, I will say again that IDEA has more features than Eclipse.

EDIT March 11, 2014

IntelliJ has improved again. Thanks to the visual user interface editor for XML layouts and most used as the base for Google Android Studio, it is still the best development environment.

The only drawbacks for the Android developer are IMHO:

• it still doesn't fully import the dependencies (libraries), so you need to manually fix the files

• it doesn’t recognize other projects (modules) that you sometimes need to add manually.

• Google Glass support does not exist

All this has in mind when importing projects executed in Eclipse, which very often happens with someone working on several Android projects.

Answer 3

I switched to IDEA for Android development.

• Intellisense actually works
• IDEA is much faster
• Refactoring is well done, and “inspections” catch a lot of places where refactoring makes sense.

Things I miss:

• New layout viewer with Android 3.0. I always change the xml layout, but it's nice to be able to switch and get an idea of ​​how it will look without launching the application. I really download eclipse for this reason when I do heavy editing of layouts.
• Guidance documentation. In intelliJ you need to press ctrl + Q to get the javaDoc of an existing method call (vs intellisense appears when you code).

Answer 4

I know that eclipse is free, but come on, I don’t know how people actually use this piece of crap to create software. I like open source, like the next guy, I just like "high quality open source", which can be an oxymoron.

I want to get a job and not struggle with the tool no matter how free it is.

After 2 years of developing Android on Eclipse, I finally give up. I hate this because:
1. The eclipse is slow.
2. Search and autofill work poorly.
3. Demand a large amount of memory.
4. Failure and hanging constantly.
5. The right or wrong way to close Eclipse can cause the workspace and settings to crash.

Eclipse: remind me every time I use, why I usually do not use it. - Romain Guy

You can check out some interesting IntelliJ IDEA features here.

Answer 5

Google has introduced a new integrated IDE for Android development (if you do not want to pay for intellij), you can find more information here http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/studio.html p>

Answer 6

I am also interested in this question. For me, the eclipse begins to slow down as additional plugins are added: CDT, aptana, pydev, ADT ....

IDEA seems an easy and interesting alternative. Due to the lack of editing the xml layout, you can do this using http://www.droiddraw.org/ or its desktop version. Pretty surprisingly easy after reading droiddraw tutorials.

I do not have enough experience with IDEA, so I can not help much. Hope more people cover this issue.

Thanks Frank

Answer 7

I think Eclipse has all the features that an IDE should have these days. But, from my point of view, it does everything differently (I'm a fan of Visual Studio).

After I tried IDEA, I had to understand that it can be configured to act almost the same as VS, so this is a very good development environment.

And version 12 has a UI editor for Android.

I can say that try comparing them to IntelliSense (or whatever you call it), a debugger (including a clock) and an editor. Much better, smarter, faster for daily use.

The idea of ​​IDEA is not free, but if you want to make money on programming, I think you can simplify the work with professional tools.

I would never pay for Eclipse.

Answer 8

As a new IDEA user, I found that the IDE was somewhat overwhelming. The IDE has more features than I thought, and may question: "How many flags can you put on the screen." As soon as the shock passed and I was able to complete a small project, I am in love. Sorry Eclipse, but you were a little graceful and would have unpredictable behavior. IDEA is a solid.

As a programmer, I want to use solid tools, and sometimes the phrase "you get what you pay for" really.

Answer 9

Google Android Studio is built on top of IDEA, suggesting that it will become the "official" developer tool when it reaches 1.0, it might be worth accelerating by learning IDEA. It also has a dark theme, so you don’t have to bother with Eclipse plugins.

Answer 10

Quick comparison

between eclipse 4.3.2 and intellij 13.0.2:

I will refer to the idea of ​​intellij as an abbreviation below (for example, I12 means intellij idea version 12)

Both are beautiful. Pro Intellij:

• Faster compiler mode: (introduced in I12) just like in eclipse, now Intellij constantly compiles everything in the background and shows files that are not compiled with a red zigzag. Just like Eclipse, but less heavy and more responsive.

• The Android UI editor (presented in I11) is even better than in the eclipse plugin plugin: it shows more properties like android: layout_span, i.e. The advanced properties hidden in the Eclipse user interface editor, forcing you to edit them from an XML layout, can be easily edited from the Intellij UI editor. In addition, while the Eclipse UI editor freezes when selecting multiple components and then editing one common property, it is very fast and easy in the Intellij UI editor. It can also show you a preview when editing XML code that you cannot do in eclipse.

• Better content support: it automatically ends when you enter the next delimiter (space or semicolon or brackets or dot), you do not need to press the enter key and then press the next delimiter, just like Visual Studio Intellisense. Intellij also puts the most relevant result on top. another feature introduced in I12 is that it searches if matches are available from the middle, not from the beginning.

• Fast: intellij is much faster than Eclipse. Eclipse 3.8 is slow, and Eclipse 4.2 is even slower due to some bugs that were fixed gradually in releases of Eclipse 4.2.1 and 4.2.2.

• more stable than eclipse. In Eclipse, a line of the layout properties editor can be inserted onto the screen while scrolling, a very poor user interface. In addition, Eclipse x64 very often crashes compared to eclipse x86 or Intellij, which may be due to errors in the J64 xDK.

• Add framework support: (New in I13) a wizard to add framework support

• As in intellij 13, this wizard has (New-> Android-> Android Activity), as in the eclipse adt plugin, maybe the only difference is that the intellij wizard can force you to a higher minimum version of the SDK, while eclipse does not.

Con Intellij:

• Gradle: Android project wizard: (New in I13) when creating an application that you can define in gui wizerd: min sdk, target sdk, icons and themes (all this fills the gap between eclipse and the previous one) and support mode (advantage over eclipse) . Although this could be considered an advantage, gradle added so many bugs to the android project management that intellij became unusable as before in intellij 12. Most bugs require either a configuration change, updating the maven repo from the Internet, or switching to and run the command from the terminal.

• Doesn't support NDK (Native Development Kit for C / C ++ development)

Answer 11

I have been using IDEA for the professional development of Android for almost a year, it is much better than Eclipse, because:

• IDE is much faster and more stable.
• Great interface designer
• Other good improvements, such as XML color picker, resource cataloging, and String resource creation.

IDEA is much better suited for Android development, and you’ll probably increase your productivity, Google knows that, so Android Studio is built on top of IDEA