| The non-standard default keyboard shortcuts bug me as well, but on the plus side they can be rebound. The thing that frustrates me most in IntelliJ is that all of the dialog windows are modal for no apparent reason. Why can't I focus the main window or at least interact with it to change tabs, select text, etc when I have dialogs open? "Find in Path" is a particularly obnoxious example: it's fairly common that I want to search for a string fragment, so I open the search dialog and set up my search context, then try to select text to copy as the search term, but I can't, so I have to start over. I want to be able to interact with the editor at all times, though I could see locking it during complicated refactors to keep me from changing code while the IDE is trying to change it too (only while a progress bar dialog is visible). Modal windows should be the exception, not the rule. --- To be clear I love IntelliJ. While I prefer simpler editors in many situations, I can't see myself going back to anything else for medium-to-large JVM projects (Scala especially). The modal niggle and a few other minor usability issues are small blemishes on an otherwise great IDE. |
Funny, as soon as you said that, I nodded and I immediately thought "For example, the universal search dialog should definitely not be modal". And then you follow with...
> "Find in Path" is a particularly obnoxious example
Totally agree and I'm surprised I missed it. Modal dialogs are not user friendly (and very old school UI).