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Google did not rewrite their Android IDE. IntelliJ IDEA had Android support for years and Google collaborated with Jetbrains to create a dedicated IDE for Android. Jetbrains has a lot of experience in specialized IDE and corresponding plugins for their main IDE IntelliJ. It was the right choice by Google to support and utilize a team of smart developers that already created something superior to Eclipse ADT on their own.
IMO Google made IntelliJ's Android support worse. They added a million items to the menus (like Eclipse), somehow made it slower, replaced IntelliJ's fast and simple project system with Gradle, which is slow and breaks all the time. Bit of a shame really.

Still a million times better than Eclipse though.

IntelliJ doesn't have a dedicated build system. You can choose from no system, Maven, and Gradle.

No system is often good enough for basic projects, but not Android development. Support libraries, configuration, API versions, NDK support, etc. make Gradle a requirement. Gradle is the official build system of Android for a reason, it's not something that Google just added willy-nilly to Android Studio.

As an Android developer, I LOVE Gradle. I think it's a vastly superior build system. I also use it for complex desktop applications, and applications that run on both desktop and Android, using shared code and OS-dependent code (the module system makes this very easy to organize).

To the author, I actually used RustDT for a while and liked it. I gave up on it when I found it was supported by only one person.

I predicted that you would lose interest and move on to something else, and my workflow would have then depend on abandonware. A gentle bit of advice: Team up with someone as enthusiastic about the idea as you. If you can't find anyone interested, that's probably a signal not to work on the thing.

You might want to check out sulong,

https://github.com/graalvm/sulong

It sounds like a project you could contribute a lot to. There are a few core committers and it sounds like you're interested in staying on the JVM. Compiling Rust to JVM and having a decent IDE for the language would be really nice too.

Finally, remember one thing about IntelliJ. It's popular because of Google, and as you have witnessed with Eclipse, Google is fickle. Chasing Google's whims seems like a bad idea in the long run.

> IntelliJ [is] popular because of Google, ...

IDEA is and was pretty well established in the Java/Scala world. Android Studio is the cherry on top.

I think there's opportunity for a new, more modern IDE. Something better then Eclipse and IntelliJ, but that's not built on top of JavaScript. Doubt there's the funding for it though, but there's definitely the need (of devs hungry for it, but not willing to pay anything for it either).
> but that's not built on top of JavaScript

I know this is a turn-off for a lot of people, but I still don't see why. Why you need an IDE that doesn't use JS?

VSC feels super fast to me. It certainly has better performance than Eclipse ever had, and feels less janky than IntelliJ.

I know some people like the light speed of Sublime, but to me there's a certain threshold where it's just fast enough. And that's where VSC is.

I have aarch64 and 4GB of memory. Electron apps are not kind to either.

http://roryok.com/blog/2017/08/electron-memory-usage-compare...

Netbeans nightly and JDK9 is quite nice on this platform.

> (...) I know some people like the light speed of Sublime, but to me there's a certain threshold where it's just fast enough. (...)

I feel the same way too. I was a Sublime Text fan/user for a few years until did the change to Atom and finally settle down on VSC two years ago. VSC is fast enough for me. Also, LSP seems interesting, ripgrep-backed search, official support for Python (as an extension) and so on.

EDIT: formatting

>I know this is a turn-off for a lot of people, but I still don't see why. Why you need an IDE that doesn't use JS?

Honestly? This is going to be unpopular:

I resent javascript and the people who write it. I feel like there's this huge cohort of mediocre developers who learned javascript either on their own via tutorials or one of those boot camps, and then just never progressed from there, skillwise.

I feel like this cohort is behind what I perceive to be the gradual but inexorable decline in quality of the web in terms of user-friendliness. Javascript and the people who write it have steadily made my experience as a user worse while simultaneously making it easier for huge advertising conglomerates to track me and sell my data to the highest bidder. I'll say nothing of intelligence agencies that unfortunately do have reason to target me because of my work using those same loopholes.

In any case, I perceive Electron to be an enabler for these mediocre developers to peddle their horrible, poorly-performant spyware on the desktop platform because they're too scared to venture outside their comfort zone and learn something other than javascript. Why should I run a whole frigging browser just to display some text?

Not all ideas are created equal, and I just wish Brendan Eich had maybe gone back to the drawing board.

JS just isn't a great language for text manipulation. Even if you ignore that it is a pretty slow language.
Also, if we ever get something like Mozilla's Servo technology in something like Electron combined with WebAssembly and you truly have a very powerful platform with lots of development options
Eclipse feels dated, but IntelliJ is quite possibly the best IDE I've ever used. The Android tooling can be a bit of a beast (until I got 8 real cores it often gave me 1990s style concurrency issues), but the IDE itself is simply superlative. It leaves me wanting for nothing.
I think IntelliJ is excellent. I can't imagine a better IDE.
You making a good job not saying "emacs" =)
I was hoping the author would talk more about the underlying technical reasons for the problems, as I would have thought he would have insight into that as a plugin developer. It seems like his reasons are really mostly around it losing mindshare and being a waste of his life and the technical is actually less important (even if it is a cause of the former).

I still use eclipse because I haven't found anything else that embraces true full multi-language development the way Eclipse does. That is, in one IDE I have front end, middle tier and back end code all in different languages, sitting next to each other as first class citizens. I can set a breakpoint in my PHP code and my Java code and my Python code, and I can have the source windows right next to each other and debug them in parallel. I just don't know anything else that does that so well.

I also find Eclipse's incremental compile model invaluable. I was kind of shocked when I tried out IntelliJ and had to wait 15 seconds while it ran Gradle for it to tell me about a compile error.

So I'm definitely in the club of being sad it's losing mindshare.

Come, ex-eclipsians, join the weirdo minority who use netbeans! We don't bite, I promise! And there are literally dozens of us across the world!
I like netbeans but was absolutely unusable on my brand new iMac; the lag.
And at least two of us frequent HN it seems!

I'm also an ex-eclipse user who have been a paying IntelliJ user before settling with Netbeans.

Can confirm that we don't bite.

Yes, as an eclipse plugin developer myself, I made this to bring as much of the lightweight experience from sublime and vscode to Eclipse.

It is basically a next-gen command palette. Much better than the builtin quick access in Eclipse.

https://github.com/dakaraphi/eclipse-plugin-commander

I love eclipse and we used eclipse for over a year until we switched to intellij.

The main reason: Updating intellij just works. Updating eclipse on arch linux meant that i have to readd the marketplace url for the proper version, add the maven plugin again and than it worked.

Yes this small detail sucked and yes it just works better in intellij.

I've been using Eclipse for what seems like forever. But it feels like with each new release, Eclipse gets worse. More freezes, more crashes, more really weird behaviour, slower code completion. The fact that I still can't turn off retarded core plugins (like the horrible Git plugin) bugs me to no end. Every time I install a new version, I have to remember to go in and delete the Git plugin jars because it fucks up my workflow.

I'll keep using it, because IntelliJ is almost as bad and has a GUI paradigm I can't get used to. But eventually that balance is going to shift.

If Eclipse is suffering from a lack of man power, they might want to consider making it easier to contribute.

>I deleted core jars from the distribution. It freezes and crashes all the time. Wow, Eclipse sucks.

Thanks dude. I just sprayed coffee all over my keyboard. The laugh was worth it though.

We're a mostly java shop at work and I'm one of the last few hold outs still on eclipse. I'm used to it and it mostly does what I need. I use the excellent vrapper (http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/), but even that has ceased development it seems. Last I tried intellij the vi plugin was unusable for me. I periodically think it's time to give it a try again. It is too bad the eclipse seems to be falling behind and losing mindshare.
Something else you could try is http://eclim.org/ . It's the only thing I really miss about eclipse.
This post makes me very sad. I am often reminded that the best tech rarely wins. I've never had to use Intellij until my current job, but it is more obvious to me than ever than Eclipse, at least for Java development, is superior to Intellij. Was the free model not enough to sustain it, unlike Intellij, which sells its IDE, or is there another major cause for most of the world drifting to the inferior choice?
> unlike Intellij, which sells its IDE

The fancy version costs money, yes, but the community edition is free and Apache licensed. Here's the source code: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

> is there another major cause for most of the world drifting to the inferior choice?

I've used both Eclipse and IntelliJ, as well as JetBrain's "ReSharper" tool in Visual Studio, and while the UI is obviously different, and in some ways better, some ways worse than Eclipse, the actual functionality and feature set of IntelliJ is clearly superior to Eclipse, especially all the refactoring and code smell tools.

The feature list is just incredible and constantly increasing: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/

Also, IdeaVim is way superior to Eclim, if you care about Vim keybindings and modal editing.

Unfortunately, Google's fork (Android Studio) is not open source. Previous versions of Android Studio (based on Eclipse) were.

Clearest example I've seen in a long time of why copyleft licenses are important.

EDIT: I was wrong about this, see below thread.

I didn't know the free version was Apache licensed. That's great!
How is Eclipse better than IntelliJ? My experience with IntelliJ has been: * Faster than eclipse. * Works better / crashes less. * Less headaches setting up projects. * Far superior vi keymap support.
I was a huge fan of Eclipse back in the day when I heavily used it for (mostly) Java development. However, for me it was death by a 1000 cuts. Workspaces getting into non-functional states that required wiping/rebuilding. Update sites constantly being moved to new URLs that required me manually making configuration changes just so the Eclipse update mechanism would work instead of spitting out cryptic error messages. Updates breaking the IDE to the point that I had to reinstall and start fresh and reconfigure everything from the ground up. Update checks causing every core on a Core i7-2600 to go to 100% cpu usage and remain that way for 30+ seconds.

When I switched to IntelliJ, I suffered from none of those problems and it did not take me long before I went and purchased a personal license.

If most people are shifting from a free product to a paid product the chances are most of those people don’t consider the paid product to be inferior
I’m baffled by how anyone could prefer eclipse to Intellij and got much glee from downvoting your opinion.

But I’ll retract my downvote if you add any reasons for why you think eclipse is superior?

I can't count the amount of times I experienced an eclipse[1] in Eclipse.

IntelliJ is snappy, has a far better search function, makes better use of screen space, lets me keep working while it compiles, and has yet to corrupt one of my projects. I've used both, personally, and for work, for a couple of years. I will take IntelliJ every time.

[1] All the menus fading out, and becoming uninteractible, as it starts recompiling.

I don't get it either, I've used Eclipse and IntelliJ for about 5 years each and there are a lot of things that I think Eclipse does better. But whenever I come across a thread like this one people are just aghast at the thought IntelliJ is not superior in all aspects. So there must be something to it but I'm not sure what to make of it.
Perspective is funny. Eclipse has always been a klunky, kludgey behemoth to me. Never enjoyed using it.
Eclipse was awesome straight out of IBM, but IMO OSGI killed it of. OSGI is such a clunky framework to work with/around, I think it slowed down the devs enough to eventually make it outshined by others.
" but it is more obvious to me than ever than Eclipse, at least for Java development, is superior to Intellij."

This is a pretty huge claim. Care to share your reasoning?

For less than a dollar a day, access to the entire Jetbrains suite is a no-brainer.
I don't understand what exactly is the reason people don't like Eclipse. The features and the overall feeling of using the IDE is great, that's why I am still using Eclipse (mostly Java and Scala development), so are many of my colleagues. I guess there are some downsides, like slower leading times and a bit clunky compilation process, but other than that, it's a solid IDE.
Everyone complains that it is bloated and slow, but I think a lot of people run it with too little memory. I always change the default settings to give it 2g of memory and it always runs fast. Some people think that's ridiculous, but given I spend 70% of my time in that environment, I'm more than happy to have it use that much memory.
I made the switch to jetbrains a while ago, but the one feature i really really miss is the absolute to focus on a set of files and resources and hide all the other unrelated code.

Mylyn alone makes me go back every now and then, but eclipse is just too bloated and unpredictable

I think you can achieve this by creating a "Scope" and filtering to it in the Project view.
IMO you won't miss it in the long run. IntelliJ is good enough to not require such an interface to keep you focused. There is a similar feature, but I never used it.
Something I didn't know until recently was that PyCharm debugger was a cross-project cooperation between PyDev people and PyCharm people [0]

[0] https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2016/05/debugger-intervie...

I went to a seminar hosted by FAI to talk about Cypress wireless chips and Murata Modules. Their IDE "WICD" is based on Eclipse. When I saw that I was surprised because I thought Eclipse was not getting much active development.

Their use of it was faster than I remember but just as difficult to navigate.

Bye Eclipse, you won't be missed >.<
This is from July 2017.