About a year with eclipse and nearly two with IDEA now.

In terms of overall usability, speed, and stability IDEA is incomparably better. Yes, there are a few minor things that eclipse does better/IDEA can't do (so I keep reading). But this is hugely overshadowed by the fact that IDEA is a high-quality, well-supported professional-feeling product. In comparison, eclipse looks, smells, and acts like a kludgy, bloated, long-lived open source project.

The main important difference is that eclipse is free, and thus some folks seem to really go to bat defending it. There is a certain powerful frugality ethic among developers.

But really, if you're not going to get bent out of shape about spending a few bucks for a piece of software you spend many of your waking hours using, there is no serious comparison.

> IDEA is a high-quality, well-supported professional-feeling product. In comparison, eclipse looks, smells, and acts like a kludgy, bloated, long-lived open source project.

Proprietary, closed source development vs. Open Source software development in a nutshell.

I'm really glad a friend recommended IntelliJ IDEA to me. It's a great product. Having used both Netbeans and Eclipse on a rather powerful machine, the UI would lag. I don't like to wait for computers to finish computing things when I'm programming pretty much in just a text editor ("writing code mode")...which brings up another point - Atom is not a great text editor either because it is so UI laggy it slows down development.

The Ultimate Edition is worth the money, but the whole system is just a bunch of very well built plugins atop the CE.