I wouldn't say it's very effective though. I end up looking for things -way- too often in it, as there is just -way- too much to it. I'm fairly experienced with it, having used it off and on for 3-4 years now (any time I'm using a language that isn't miserable I'll just use Sublime), but I still find myself trying to figure out how to do certain things. And starting out it was terrible; yes, plenty of auto-magic things that make Java suck less, but even just a basic 'find any occurrences of this line of text in the project' required multiple tries to figure out (apparently it's not "Find...", "Find Next/Move to Next Occurrence", nor "Find Usages", but "Find in Path". Which is not at all what I would have expected when it's not a class I'm searching for).
You haven't used many IDEs. This is standard behavior. "find next" or "find usages" is for the current editor and you should never expect it to search the entire project. Searching files recursively is usually called "find in path".
I HADN'T used many IDEs. I -did- say 'starting out'.
Regardless, defending it as standard behavior means you're arguing it has -average- UX. The OP was in favor of it having -good- UX (well, 'clean, customizable and nothing is hidden away', and I was just pointing out that doesn't necessarily mean it's good).
You seem to have a lot of trouble with past vs present tenses. What I think it should be is not something I ever said. I listed out what options seemed (past tense) more likely to me, given the list in IntelliJ.
Yeah +1 for the whole suite of IntelliJ IDEs. The UI is predictable and there is a fantastic VIM plugin (which is a hard requirement for me to use an IDE over just a terminal)