Except for occasional Common Lisp development (Emacs!), I just about live in an IDE. For the most part this is the excellent NetBeans 6.0 with Ruby support. However, I have dozens of existing Java projects and they almost all are IntelliJ projects so I will be using IntelliJ as long as I need these projects (long time!). To make this “IDE soup” even richer I am learning Scala (best development environment appears to be the Eclipse plugin) and experimenting a little with Google’s Android portable device platform (again, an Eclipse plugin).
It takes me a minute or two to really get into a different IDE when I change tasks – makes me nostalgic for the 1980s and 1990s when I lived in Emacs for programming, email, shell, and usenet. While there are interesting Emacs tools for Android, Ruby, Rails, Java, and Scala, I am not willing to go back in history and spend my days in Emacs.
There’s a Scala plug-in for IntelliJ too. The plug-in is opensource:
).
http://svn.jetbrains.org/idea/Trunk/scala/
and pretty good (it’s made partially in Scala, so it’s a good practice bench
Also for Android development there’s seems to be a newly started intelliJ plug-in:
http://code.google.com/p/idea-android/
http://plugins.intellij.net/plugin/?id=1792
Thanks Thomas. A few months ago, I evaluated the IntelliJ Ruby/Rails plugin support and found NetBeans better at that time. I have been an enthusiastic IntelliJ customer for many years but since I plan on minimizing my Java development in the future, I am going to stick with my last purchased version of IntelliJ (version 6), and use NetBeans for Ruby: most of my development. Eclipse is OK for learning Scala and Android.
There will likely be a version 8 of IntelliJ in less than year: I will evaluate that when available and look at the Ruby/Scala/Android/etc plugins.
When I did almost all of my develpment in Java, paying for IntelliJ was a no-brainer because I think that it is the best Java IDE.