Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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Tue, 21 Oct 2003

Intellij IDEA

I downloaded a copy of Intellij IDEA a few days before Ward Cunningham and I were scheduled to do a presentation on test-first programming at PNSQC. I must say that it's the only IDE that hasn't made me run screaming back to Emacs.

It seems, however, kind of flaky on the Mac. The first time I launched it, it wouldn't let me dismiss one of the floating windows, but it's worked fine all later times. It's crashed a few times, but without losing anything. And, literally just before our presentation, we wanted to enlarge the font. I'm still not quite sure how we did it, but we changed the font instead. The result:

Which menu do you think has the command that takes you to a declaration? And when we pulled down a menu, we got something with this information content:

ðððð
ðððððððððð
ððððð
ðððð
ððððððð
ððððð
ððððððððð

Fortunately, we had presence of mind, Emacs, and we remembered that the little green arrow on the right meant "run the FIT tests". So we edited code in Emacs, ran tests with IDEA, and a good time was had by all. And we later had Andy Tinkham to help Ward get the JUnit tests working in Eclipse while I pontificated to distract the audience.

Not the most auspicious day for IDEA, but I'd still use it for Java coding if I could get some employer to buy it for me. At the current price, with the Mac flakiness, it doesn't quite cut it for this independent consultant. (It was not too hard to figure out how to correct the problem - just not in the heat of the moment, with maybe 100 people watching. So I have a usable copy for the next few days.)

(We were also using Word to write FIT tables. Word crashed during the presentation. Moreoever, we stripped off all Word's toolbars to remove clutter. Now, when I get home, I discover that I cannot add back the Drawing toolbar. When I do, Word just hangs. I guess I have nothing better to do than reinstall.)

(Seems harsh to be more snarkish to Microsoft than to Jetbrains, makers of IDEA. But I bet Jetbrains would trade some goodwill for monopoly positioning and a huge cash hoard, some of which could be usefully spent on Word for the Macintosh, which is - on my machine - markedly buggier than the Windows version. Please do better, Redmond guys.)

## Posted at 09:13 in category /misc [permalink] [top]