[jimminy]

In the case of Java, while the IDE systems are good, the last time I used Java I decided to do it within an editor and use CLI scripts for building and packaging, and enjoyed it much more than any Java IDE in past experience. It made me feel more productive, anecdotally.

Mind you most of my prior Java experience was 2007-2010, and the last time with the editor + CLI was in 2014, and just with a fun example. The editor + CLI workflow was still solid and similar to Node or Python workflow in that regard.

[muzzio]

How did you handle things like import statements? That's really the biggest thing for me: if I'm working in a large project, I don't want to have to think about what package some really obscure utility is before using it.

Losing Shift+F6 refactoring is a little annoying, but definitely not something that makes programming Java impossible. Autocomplete might get a little hairy as well if you're referring to classes that exist in Jar files too, or am I wrong about this?

As for everything else, using the CLI for source control and building is something I do anyways, even when using an IDE. At least with Gradle, that is. As long as some of those issues have solutions, though, I think this might be possible. Maybe I'll have look into it a bit more.

[stygiansonic]

Decent Java IDEs handle import statements automatically. (And can also organize them for you)

Many people don't like Eclipse but I find the Java-oriented distribution it pretty decent for an IDE. Auto-complete is handled well, and searching through classes/types is also easy. (Knowing the shortcut keys helps)

As for imports, when you start typing a class name that isn't currently imported or in scope, you can use auto-complete to select which one you want. There may be multiple matches from multiple packages if you are searching for a class name of `Result`, so you can select the `org.foo.someframework.Result` and the IDE will add the import statements for you.

In general, I haven't really had much trouble with Java and an IDE, even in large projects with a huge number of dependencies.

I haven't really tried IntelliJ but from the feedback I've heard, it's a great IDE as well.

[jimminy]

Like I said, it's been a few years, and the project I was working on was a smaller project, ~1000 lines of code.

I try to minimize imports, and am not touching them often. I'm very considerate of what I'm adding to a codebase, so I don't mind the extra space in my head. Also keep reference docs for the language and libraries on hand or accessible, to alleviate some of the need.

And I consider frequent renaming to be a sign that I hadn't thought out the problem well enough before starting. When I see a true need, I use Multifile Find (& Replace) in Sublime, multi-step process for audit followed by action.

And I've always found auto-complete's to be more frustrating that a saver of time, especially those that would fire on whitespace, so disable them or put them under a secondary keymap.

I'm sure the IDE saves some time, for many, but all the reasons people use them are mostly annoyances to me. Though there are still some merit, like having an embedded debugger and intelligent index of signatures.

[BurningFrog]

I think an IDE is a must for Java.

You get an astonishing power to refactor the code in ways I couldn't have dreamed about before.

[JonathonW]

^ This.

It's not so much about reducing the boilerplate you have to manually enter. While that's nice, the real value of a good IDE is in its refactoring tools, taking trivial but tedious tasks like class, function, or variable renaming and automating them so that they can happen both instantly and error-free.

And variable renaming's the simplest refactor that a tool like IntelliJ or Resharper can perform.

[Retra]

The vast majority of my variable renaming needs are met by a suitable regex search & replace, which you can find in any decent text editor.

[gnaritas]

That's a very blub answer. Regex search & replace isn't in the same universe as automated refactorings.

[alasdair_]

Once you start working with a big codebase, it becomes much more difficult to simply use a regex search and replace, especially when dealing with polymorphism as well.

For example, in my current project, there are four classes with the same name ( , each of which are used by a few other classes, some of which use subclasses of the parent rather than the parent itself. With IntelliJ, I can rename any arbitrary class with a single keypress and it just works, including renaming the files in git where appropriate. This is hard to do in vim or any other text editor.

The same applies to functions. Let's say there are ten different functions called getFoo, three of which are in completely different classes and some of which have different arguments like: String getFoo(int a) String getFoo(ArrayList b) int getFoo(String bar) SomeThing getfoo(int blah)

etc.

how do you always rename the correct ones, in every location, and never accidentally rename the wrong ones?

Making something like this refactoring (and others, like moving a method to another class and updating every reference, including in subclasses and interfaces) work 100% of the time, automatically, through a single keypress completely changes your workflow.

It's like having automated unit tests or a CI tool - sure, you can test things by hand, or do the build by hand, but all of that stuff takes mental energy and it's often hard to execute the same things manually and perfectly ten thousand times - that's the whole POINT of computers.

In practice, what this means is that friction is reduced. If I see that someone has named somethign poorly, or I see a method that belongs in a different class, I can just fix it within literally two seconds and then continue as I was. All the Javadoc is updated and published and everyone else (who is also using an IDE) can hit a single key to jump to the definition or all the usages of a particular reference.

Damn, usages, there is another thing. How on earth do you find all usages of a particular function with only a regex in anything other than a small codebase with only a few developers? Your regex doesn't understand scoping or method overloading or interfaces or abstract classes or any of that other stuff, so you have to wade through a lot of irrelevant data to find all the time where someone calls getFoo(bar) where "bar" is a String and not an int or something else.

There is a lot more, of course - detecting duplicate code chunks and automatically offering to turn them into a function, for example, or the detection of uninitialized variables or just general code smells.

I use VIM keybindings so I get all the benefits of a good, programmable text editor too and I can still do a regex search if I wish, but the power of an IDE (especially IntelliJ) is the reduction in friction and thus the improvement in continuous flow state.

[Retra]

>how do you always rename the correct ones, in every location, and never accidentally rename the wrong ones?

Well to start, you limit the scope in which they are used so that you only use one such object per file, and you import it with a different name if you've got to mix them. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do regardless of whether you have an IDE or not.

>How on earth do you find all usages of a particular function with only a regex in anything other than a small codebase with only a few developers?

Rename it and try to compile. :)

I don't have anything serious against IDEs. They're pretty awesome when they are well-maintained and reliable. I just don't think they're all upside. For one, when I was first learning Java and I'd get a compile error due to packaging or import conflicts, the IDE only served to remind me that I was incompetent about how Java actually worked. And learning the IDE meant learning a lot about what the IDE wants in its particular configuration, not what the actual Java compiler needed.

Moreover, if you ever move to a language that doesn't have as high degree of IDE support as Java, you start having to fight with it quite a bit, and many of those wonderful features aren't available, don't work well, or actively undermine your process.

If what you are doing is old news and part of an active "enterprise-y" code process, then it does reduce friction. Otherwise, it can be a source of friction unto itself.

[tdestan]

>If what you are doing is old news and part of an active "enterprise-y" code process, then it does reduce friction. Otherwise, it can be a source of friction unto itself.

I don't understand this statement. What does having an "enterprise-y" code process have to do with anything?

[dllthomas]

> the real value of a good IDE is in its refactoring tools

Is there much reason these really need to be integrated?

[tdestan]

In principle, I don't see why they should have to be. Given an extensible editor and sufficient blood and sweat, you ought to be able to build anything. But in practice, the best refactoring tools I've used have been bundled into IDEs (Jetbrains products, mostly).

I'd be interested in an existence proof here: Is anyone aware of refactoring tools that are not bundled with an IDE, yet still compare favorably with something like Resharper?

[dllthomas]

> Given an extensible editor and sufficient blood and sweat, you ought to be able to build anything.

Yeah, personally I prefer to do my integration in the shell, and then have thin hooks into my editor where applicable.

> Is anyone aware of refactoring tools that are not bundled with an IDE, yet still compare favorably with something like Resharper?

I'd also be very interested in this. I do most of my refactoring semi-manually (leaning heavily on my editor and compiler).