What If I Could Take My IDE Habits With Me Everywhere ?

Back when WordPerfect was the king of the hill and Microsoft Word was the challenger I remember there was a setting or something you could turn on that would make Word look more like WordPerfect so that you wouldn't have to re-learn all your habits.

You may be asking what is WordPerfect, right ? I guess Microsoft won that war eh ?

Eclipse IDE Usage is Hard Wired Into My Muscle Memory

I am an Eclipse user since 2003, and Eclipse is a great IDE. For java programmers, it has been the best free IDE you can get for many years. But if you have the cash and don't mind burning it, there is always IntelliJ, and people who use it swear by it. It is used at conferences by the presenters, and always makes me quite envious.

So when I got a free license in a raffle, I finally installed it. Alas, if only I knew how to use it.

Why did it take me six months to even try IntelliJ ?

Well, I wasn't going to take any time to relearn all my habits and keystrokes. That can sometimes be a day or more, and who has a day ? No, I put this off forever, almost lost my free license key it took so long.

Why did I finally decide to take the time ?

I would probably never even worry about it, because Eclipse is still serving me very well. But there is this Groovy / Grails thing. I am really getting hooked on Groovy and Grails, and native support for Groovy and Grails in IntelliJ is supposed to be amazing. So for Xmas I gave myself a few hours to install and play with IntelliJ.

Kinda weird I guess but that's the kind of thing that geeks give themselves for Xmas I guess.

Wasn't so great after all ?

It may be a bit early to tell, but I expected the gosh darned thing to practically write stuff for me, it is so highly touted.

Well, it didn't. Wouldn't even work in Groovy. First I had to download the groovy plugins. Then I had to figure out how to point it properly to my groovy installation, and of course I didn't know how to do that either. Still didn't work.

Now I am a couple hours into it. and it is impressive. But it still doesn't run my simple groovy script.

Glad to know that Eclipse isn't so bad after all. I like Eclipse. Now I wonder if there is just some kind of way to make Eclipse and IntelliJ look the same so I won't have to keep learning 2 ways to do everything....

Or better yet, make even Netbeans and other IDE's skinnable the same way ? Now we're talking about the real ability to compare features, not just which habits I happen to have hardwired into my muscle memory.