Why I Pay Money for a Java IDE

You’d have to be a programmer to want to read this post.

People sometimes are surprised to find that I spend money on IntelliJ IDEA, a commercial Java IDE. Why not use good free alternatives like Eclipse or NetBeans?

It’s the smooth edges of IntelliJ that keeps me purchasing an upgrade each year. It seems almost every feature is well-designed and makes my programming easier, better, and faster.

Here’s yet another example I found this week: To localise Poker Copilot in different languages I first need to internationalise it. That mostly means, stripping out all strings into a resource bundle. This could be an arduous task, with plenty of potential for screw-ups. But not with IntelliJ IDEA. Watch in this video how it guesses exactly what I want to do when I move the cursor to a string and press the hotkey I’ve defined for the “Internationalise” refactoring.

It auto-locates the resource bundle, auto-suggests a resource bundle key, moves the string into all language versions of the file, and inserts the relevant code to find the string.

(Note: this video is blurry at small resolution: view directly on YouTube in full-screen HD mode for best results)