IDEA still has a horrible GUI in my opinion. All sorts of weird subtle bugs relating to the very fundamental UI interactions that make the whole experience very frustrating. The main one I remember is that certain buttons in the UI are simply unreliable - depending on what processing is going on (sometimes if nothing heavy is being processed), certain buttons in the UI will not respond when clicked. I used IDEA for years and very often had to click a button 4-5 times until it would activate, especially while using the debugger.
If the UI toolkit can't get a button right, it is completely broken IMO. Even including intelliJ products, I have never used a Java GUI which was good.
I've never experienced anything like that in IntelliJ, and I've used it everyday for years now. Granted there are bugs especially around big releases, but I've never seen any UI bug like you described. Everything is always smooth and responsive.
I just fired it up to see and it's still kind of there. For example when loading a project, there's a popup progress bar and the UI kind of janks around while it's loading. If you click anything in the UI while that's happening like a menu, the event is lost.
OK - it's loading so that's not unexpected. However my previous experience was that the same thing would happen to the UI at all sorts of surprising moments when other processes were ongoing, such as linting or using the debugger. Kind of hard to reproduce without a large project at hand though.
Then I had to stop testing and SIGKILL it because the whole application got into an infinite loop of NPEs in the UI event loop of all places!
I too experienced using intelliJ for many years and this seems largely in line with what I remember.
The stop/run button in the Run pane often doesn't work for me - i mouse over, it doesn't highlight, and clicking it does nothing. Minimise and maximise the pane, and it works fine.
Sounds more like an IDEA bug rather than a Swing bug. I've implemented an editing tool (realtime video generation parameter editing w/ feedback from the generator) that really has a lot of issues.
Part of them because i didn't fully understand Swing when i began the project and partly because synchronizing GUI's to another live process is a quite error prone task.
A debugger process is almost certainly not living in the same thread as the Swing UI of IDEA so this almost surely more of a thread synchroniztion issue rather than Swing issue. (You really don't watch to do any cross-thread touching with Swing apart from for a very limited set of components built for this).
Yes it's certainly something to do with threads. Still the way it manifests is weird. For example sometimes in apps like Chrome or Firefox the tab bar will freeze momentarily while the UI is hung waiting for something, however if you click something like a tab close button during this period your click will be processed once the UI un-hangs.
In intelliJ it was like whenever the UI was not immediately responding to mouse events, it would often just lose the event instead of it being correctly processed once the UI thread was freed up.
Chrome/FF in this case has an UI thread that becomes unresponsive for whatever reason and doesn't empty it's message-queue (that contains the mouse/keyboard/etc events).
In the case of IntelliJ there is probably some of their code accepting the event and then probably has some ad-hoc message passing by setting a field that is polled by the receiver thread under the assumption that the receiver always runs faster than a human can act, however as soon as that assumption is broken by some pause you get what you describe.
The JetBrains merge tools are the best ones I've found!
I have it configured as my git mergetool
The only problem is it takes absolutely ages to start up, which is maybe a JVM thing
I wish there was a way to have git pass all of the conflicting files in a merge to the mergetool at once. Instead of having to wait for JetBrains to load up for each individual file and close after each one :(
JVM apps can start in <100 msec, and IDEA has a 'lite' mode now where it's more like a text editor. That starts very fast.
IDEA is slow(ish) to start because it's an IDE so it's loading tons of plugins, a project database etc. Though actually recent versions only take a few seconds on my admittedly high end MacBook.
There's also some AOT options for the JVM to get a faster startup, along with -Xquickstart. I definitely agree with the "you're loading an entire IDE" statement.
I do it the other way around, I let git write the default conflicting files. And then switch to IntelliJ, press Ctrl-a and type "resolve", press enter. And voila I am in IntelliJ's git resolution windows where each conflicting file is listed.
Yes, but they are also an example of why people don't like Java UIs.
I.e. the amount of UI problems you have with it when using a tiling wm or wayland (or both) are just sad and make it unusable. Other widely used UI's might also have problems but at least are somewhat usable under wayland and/or tiling wm.
Ironically many of this problems go back/are rooted in to AWT...
In the past Intellij did work if started directly by x (without a wm) which was pretty cool for some very very neach use cases, but sadly (through reasonably) this isn't the case anymore.
Context menues not being at the right position, directly closing after opening (so fast that you can't really see it) as well as menu items sometimes not being selectable.
Especially the quick command/search menues doesn't work at all and context menues sometimes don't work either.
(Edit: And context/popup menues not working is the main theme of problems with Java GUIs, hence my parent post, also setting the "magic" no-reparenting env variable doesn't fix it)
I can second these issues using i3 and arch. I've had subtle issues like these in Ghidra and when I once tried Armitage (I wanted the Hail Mary feature), it was so messy I've never used it since.
Most of the hate towards electron is only because of its resource usage problems and not because of its capabilities. Vscode is it's testament for capabilities.
Jetbrains suite is great but they're not resource efficient in any way!
If the JVM based apps do not yield a significant performance benefit then there is no point in going after that.
It's not only resource usage, but performance in general. I can feel lagging when typing slowly in VSCode editor, even in plain text files without even trying autocomplete or any IDE feature. IntelliJ IDEA doesn't have any lag, Eclipse too, and both offer more IDE capabilities than VSCode.
>The second is the DOM. It is a horrible collection of hacks that make simple things hard and hard things impossible. I have thought many times “if only was I drawing this control/layout directly, I would’ve finished hours ago.”
As a user of electron apps there are clearly limitations on what the UI can do as a result and the style of rendering it is clearly webish.
Another issue I keep on seeing with web based apps, moreso on android, is they seem utterly incapable of dealing with the slightest network non-connectivity. The UI tends to freeze.
I do take your point entirely on the fact that perhaps java's inherent performance limitations might result in a fairly comparable poor experience however.
And the DOM, and the size overhead and it's JS/TS and some other parts from dev (i.e. not user) perspective.
Through tbh. I don't see much reason to spend time for a Java UI framework, Java for desktop is just kinda annoying and somewhat even more dead then Java for servers (which isn't really dead tbh).
Through I guess idea/Intellij would love to replace the low level parts with something which works more reliable.
Yeah the reasons for choosing JS/TS don't have to be stated from developers' perspective because its the goto tool for new products nowadays.
Also I don't think the desktop app market for java is small in any way. But if there's no difference between electron and JVM UIs then there is no incentive for teams to switch.
If the UI toolkit can't get a button right, it is completely broken IMO. Even including intelliJ products, I have never used a Java GUI which was good.