[ubercow13]

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.

[chinhodado]

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.

[ubercow13]

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.

[twic]

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.

[whizzter]

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).

[ubercow13]

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.

[whizzter]

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.