Are you disappointed with current selection of Java IDEs eating all your memory and still being slow and clunky to use? Me too. And that is why I decided to write a blog post on the subject to help other people who despair hopelessly toiling away in Eclipse or IntelliJ find a good alternative so that they can feel like the guy above.

Eclipse and IntelliJ are Awful

For a long time I thought IntelliJ sucked and although Eclipse wasn't great, it was at least everywhere. But let's be candid here, Eclipse is slow and looks the same way it did 10+ years ago (it was ugly then too). And yes, I installed devstyles. It still doesn't look good. And IntelliJ might look good but it is just so slow. And yes, I increased the memory available to it. It didn't help that much. To add to that, both IDEs take forever* to start.
* Forever is subjective here it really isn't that long but its too long for me.

So VSCode?

So a couple weeks ago after developing with Eclipse for sometime, I noticed this discontent welling up within me. And it was primarily that discontent that gave rise to the opinions which I have so strongly developed against both IntelliJ and Eclipse. So naturally, I desperately started searching for alternatives. I had been down this road before and no website ever lists anything but, Eclipse, IntelliJ, NetBeans? Seriously. and BlueJ (Who are we kidding? This is for teaching Java.) As I had mentioned prior these options are awful. But this time, I took a different path. I fired up VSCode, an editor I have been in love with ever since I found out how amazing it was for developing Rust. I searched through plugins for "Java" absolutely certain I was going to face grave disappointment. But, I was instead surprised. Microsoft had a wonderful collection of plugins all nicely packaged up for my Java developing convenience.

It's like an Elegant, Intelligent, Fast version of Eclipse!

As soon as I installed the package. My list of files automatically started linting. And they turned yellow and red and stuff. When I went to fix various bugs that I was in the middle of fixing when the urge to run from Eclipse became too strong, I was presented with actual intellisense (unlike Eclipse's dumbsense.) It was almost to good to be true, but in uninterestingly interesting way it turned out to actually be true. Indeed, I had previously setup my environment to run with Maven, so I just installed Maven and the VSCode plugin for it and I was off to the races! At some other point when I restarted VSCode, it started almost instantaneously which was just another plus in my book. All-in-all I was just absolutely thrilled with this find.

Go Try It! Right Now!

So if you are indeed like me and you are also tired of IntelliJ and Eclipse,  Then let me ask you, "What are you waiting for?" Seriously, if you hate Eclipse and IntelliJ you won't regret trying to escape them. Just go download the plugins or VSCode or both and make it happen!

I hope you enjoy VSCode as much as I have and may your Java adventures be awesome. If you feel very strongly about this topic or then write a comment. Or don't, I don't care that much. :P

Au Revoir. :)