So you may recall I posted about some problems I had with IntellIJ IDEA previously ( http://blathersource.org/blog/archives/73-IntelliJ...-Can-we-talk-about-this.html ). Since that time I had managed to repair the bizarre problem with it by... well completely whacking my entire home directory configuration of it. I use a Mac so it was in Library/Application Support and Library/Caches and maybe even preferences. That said, after cleaning all of that out and restarting IDEA, the memory leak weirdness had stopped occurring and all was well. Of course I had to go reinstall all my plugins and such, but hey. So hopefully this info will help others if they ever end up running into this same problem. So uhm.. Google index this please. ;)

You also may recall that I posted about trying out Eclipse ( http://blathersource.org/blog/archives/74-Trying-Eclipse.html ). I got a lot of great comments about it, pointing me in the right direction. Plus my previous employers had a group of folk who were highly into Eclipse and had some good advice. Of course, once I got IDEA working again it was hard to argue with myself to spend time getting used to Eclipse whereas that time could be spent coding.

So flash forward to no longer working with Jive Software (as of around mid October for those who are not aware). I no longer have a license for IntelliJ IDEA, so in working with another set of projects, I found myself firing up Eclipse again and guess what ... I adore it! I feel like it really lets me really customize it to how I want it to feel, I love the level of plugin support for various things in it, and free is great. ;D I find more resources with it though. If I run into a confusion point I usually can quickly google an answer. Plus it's not hard to find a chatroom or something to pop into to talk to real people "live". If I "let go" of what I'm used to with IDEA, I actually find it more intuitive. I don't really feel like going into serious details of what I like about it compared to IDEA, but suffice to say I am highly pleased with it and likely will stick with it for future java programming. =) I actually even though of writing up a document on things I learned while converting. (like terms that IDEA uses and what they map to in Eclipse) Who knows if I'll ever write that.