[mberning]

Tooling goes way beyond the editor/IDE. Eclipse is a very good free option. As is IntelliJ CE. I personally have the all products pack and use the ultimate version.

Beyond the IDE you also have to consider the build tools, package management, debuggers, profilers, static analysis tools, etc.

It’s honestly too much for an HN comment. But as an example, if I do open one of these awful projects at work and it uses gradle for example, intellij will understand that, import the project, get all dependencies, let me run any target with debugging or profiling, give me code coverage, etc.

[k0tan32]

Thanks for sharing your experience.

It's a fair note about tooling in general, I started with the code editing because it's the first thing before you can taste and judge the rest.

I think my frustration comes from the fact that in most other ecosystem I can use the tools I like, but in Java I have to use things like Intellij.

Intellij CE may be open source, but it is entirely owned by a private business whose primary goal is to sell their product - which affects how well are the integrated, open to accept community feedback, etc.

[javanonymous]

There are several open source tools for Java (Eclipse, Visual Studio plugins, Netbeans and others).

The reason I don't use them is not because they are bad, but because IntelliJ is so much better.

I even use IntelliJ Ultimate for non Java code like React, even though Visual Studio Code seems to be de-facto standard for React developers and guides.