IntelliJ has some very nice usability features. Most IntelliJ users I know prefer their IDE because of it.
Examples for better usability:
- Dark theme looks good -> we are working on improving it in Eclipse
- Highlighting braces uses a color which actually let you see the matching color -> JDT team plans to improve this in M7
- All trees are searchable by default if you simple start typing -> awesome feature I would love to have this in Eclipse but have no idea how to implement this
- Shift + Shift for open resources is so much easier to us compared to our shortcut
- Alt+Enter is also easier to reach compared with Ctrl+1
- Debugger is much better then ours it adds the value of the variable into the editor after the code. Also our default Eclipse debug perspective is IMHO not very usable.
But IntelliJ has also certain issues:
- It is relatively slow
- Impossible to open (efficiently) several projects at the same time
- Swing UI start to look broken on Linux
- Lots more but let's not tell them ;-)
Best regards, Lars