66 engineers on Hacker News describe using IntelliJ IDEA first-hand: 31 endorse it, 2 regret it, 9 are mixed.
“it's a bit too early to leave the full IDE completely”
mixed · personal · brabel · 2026-10-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Yes, it's had its performance issues, but people tend to forget the feature set they brought to market”
mixed · personal · 22 yr · millerm · 2025-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I used IntelliJ professionally for almost a decade... I still occasionally receive YouTrack notification emails for the bugs I posted circa 2009”
mixed · production · 9 yr · iLemming · 2025-11-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“which was a nightmare given I'd just been using IntelliJ IDEA”
endorse · production · bartread · 2025-10-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Once the company included IntelliJ for that cloud IDE, usage spiked massively.”
endorse · production · mr_tristan · 2024-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“in the places where it tends to suffer, IntelliJ ends up covering the ground anyway”
endorse · production · stickfigure · 2024-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I agree the Jetbrains stuff is great, I've been using them since 2001 with IntelliJ IDEA.”
endorse · personal · 23 yr · avalys · 2024-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“that was a lot of time we got back again when we switched to IntelliJ”
endorse · production · jakewins · 2024-11-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using IDEA since 2015, and a language-specific IntelliJ based IDE since 2013”
endorse · personal · 8 yr · stephenr · 2023-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“only intellij was able to actually help me with stuff”
endorse · personal · Cthulhu_ · 2022-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Switched to IntelliJ in 2018 when writing Scala.”
endorse · personal · 4 yr · tasuki · 2022-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have been using IntelliJ IDEs since the early 2000s. Currently I am using WebStorm's ... I could not work without it.”
endorse · production · 20 yr · jansan · 2022-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“JetBrains' IDEs are great for the languages which they explicitly support, but are often hilariously bad for the languages that are supported with plugins”
mixed · personal · quanticle · 2022-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I still prefer JetBrains' IDEs, but they are extremely glitchy. It's just a fact of life if you've spent any significant amount of time in them.”
mixed · production · 10 yr · 5e92cb50239222b · 2021-12-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“There's a Bazel plugin for Intellij that works reasonable well for Java... it's got some issues.”
mixed · production · jvolkman · 2021-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I think the IDE is subjectively better. I increase the heap setting in Intellij to 4G”
endorse · personal · astange · 2021-11-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Hopping on the IntelliJ love train. I've been using it for the last five years. It is the one piece of software I still get excited about.”
endorse · personal · 5 yr · ckosidows · 2020-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have been using IntelliJ for many years now (on a personal license) but pleasantly surprised how many nice/useful features are a key stroke away.”
endorse · personal · hans0l074 · 2020-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've also used intelij idea with Java, and while it was much smoother than anything in the typescript ecosystem, it's definitely not faster than using grep.”
mixed · personal · adamkf · 2020-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Been paying for Intellij for nearly a year now and I don't regret a day of it.”
endorse · personal · 1 yr · rubyn00bie · 2019-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“That problem appeared really quickly when we migrated our devs to IntelliJ, and slowed it down to a crawl.”
regret · production · Damarus · 2018-09-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I use IntelliJ over VS Code for writing Scala because I've had difficulties getting the Ensime extensions to work properly and IntelliJ usually just works.”
endorse · personal · rockostrich · 2017-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Learning Jetbrains IDEA took me a while though but today I love it.”
endorse · production · nugator · 2016-12-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“If there is even a slight difference between IntelliJ's implementation and `go fmt` then it will cause CI to fail.”
regret · production · MikeKusold · 2016-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The "jump-to-declaration" functionality of Jetbrains is so smooth and so good that I actually have a hard time not having it available now.”
endorse · production · brightball · 2016-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“IntelliJ IDEA's plugin for Kotlin has a button "Convert Java file to Kotlin", which does a fairly good conversion.”
endorse · production · staltz · 2015-07-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“IntelliJ IDEA (great IDE, we don't use it collaboratively or anything”
endorse · production · KevinEldon · 2013-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“IDEA's Maven support just works; I run the Maven goal from the sidebar”
endorse · production · vonmoltke · 2013-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using IntelliJ IDEA for many years (coming from C++ in EMACS), and it truly made me more productive”
endorse · personal · henrik_w · 2013-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using the EAP for a while now, and it's been a real improvement over 12.”
endorse · personal · allengeorge · 2013-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've also been using IntelliJ for various large projects written in Scala... I also wish they'd add better support for profiling and heap dump analysis.”
mixed · production · kvtrew76557 · 2013-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the debugger that comes with these editors is something I can't live without”
endorse · personal · 1 yr · edwinnathaniel · 2013-11-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Since then I switched to the full blown IntelliJ IDE and never again will I use anything else.”
endorse · personal · kclay · 2013-06-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“after nearly ten years of using IntelliJ (including both years and years using the free version and years and years using cracked version), I'm eventually buying it.”
endorse · personal · 10 yr · martinced · 2012-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've had every version of IDEA since version 2!”
endorse · personal · 9 yr · millerm · 2012-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Since Jetbrains / IntelliJ IDEA introduced their @NotNull annotation (years and years ago) I've been using it religiously”
endorse · personal · martinced · 2012-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using the Android UI editor in IDEA 12 EAP for quite some time and it's been really pleasing to use”
endorse · personal · epidemian · 2012-12-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've had good luck with both Intellij+Scala plugin and with the Eclipse plugin.”
endorse · production · brightsize · 2012-08-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It took me around three weeks to get used to it. I never want to switch back to Eclipse. It just runs so much smoother”
endorse · production · amorphous · 2011-12-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My general feeling with IntelliJ is that it is a very polished product that I've been using since 2000”
mixed · production · 10 yr · wallflower · 2010-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Intellij IDEA lately.”
neutral · personal · rovr138 · 2026-10-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Our team uses IntelliJ so we use Code with Me with Slack for AV.”
neutral · production · tomwphillips · 2025-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I use vs code and intellij. Both can self update.”
neutral · personal · jillesvangurp · 2024-12-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“connect Intellij to the chat and ask it a question about code in my open editor.”
neutral · production · jillesvangurp · 2024-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Running `vite` in IntelliJ with `npm run dev` will not show console logs in the IDE”
neutral · personal · Noumenon72 · 2024-10-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Before that, it was intellij (and long before that, eclipse).”
neutral · personal · submain · 2023-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I used IntelliJ too, and the tooling of JavaFX is broken”
neutral · production · super256 · 2022-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Just edit file, build plugin, install plugin to the IDE (using the menu in the GUI interface).”
neutral · personal · dannymi · 2022-06-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I previously used IntelliJ IDEA on Linux for over eight years, so I can sympathize with your struggles.”
neutral · personal · 8 yr · bmc7505 · 2021-12-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using this set up in both VSCode for Rust and Java in IntelliJ.”
neutral · personal · PureParadigm · 2021-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use IntelliJ Idea + Cursive”
neutral · production · kaliszad · 2020-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Personally I've been using Intellij with the Vim plugin.”
neutral · personal · monroewalker · 2020-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“IdeaVim for the IntelliJ family is really good, that's what I use today.”
neutral · personal · city41 · 2020-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I develop locally with intellij but run my integration tests in a docker container (or a few)”
neutral · production · jzoch · 2020-02-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using IntelliJ almost 20 years now”
neutral · personal · 20 yr · HenriNext · 2019-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it has nearly all features of IntelliJ Idea that I use daily but runs on my shell”
neutral · personal · VvR-Ox · 2018-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“not quite as good as IPython or IntelliJ with Java.”
neutral · personal · Cieplak · 2017-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“they are often advertising JetBrains IDEA which I've been using for years.”
neutral · personal · aembleton · 2017-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use the latest tools and machines (both Win and Mac, paired with Intelli J).”
neutral · production · throwway222 · 2014-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“getting SBT and Play Java to work correctly in IDEA was enough of a pain”
neutral · personal · matrix · 2013-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using IDEA professionally for four years.”
neutral · production · 4 yr · eropple · 2013-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use IntelliJ as standard - everyone uses it.”
neutral · production · lemming · 2011-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I spent 3 years doing Java on large-scale telco projects using IntellJ, I'm not an amateur Java dev.”
neutral · production · 3 yr · j_col · 2011-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using IDE's (Borland, Microsoft, IntelliJ, Eclispe, Netbeans, etc)”
neutral · personal · xtracto · 2011-11-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?