Since I began programming I've heard colleagues talking about how IntelliJ IDEA was great. Higher productivity, smart suggestions and a world of assistances were the most common praises.
For the ones who never heard about it, IntelliJ IDEA is an IDE focused for Java development. It has a free (Community Edition) and a paid version (Ultimate Edition).
I've always been an Eclipse fan since I began programming so I never bothered much to spend time learning yet another tool to do the same things of my everyday programming life, until the day that was supposed to be the "End of the world". Yes, on that day (12/21/2012) Jet Brains decided to do a "End of the world sale" and sold IntelliJ and some other products of their catalogue with a great discount (50 bucks for IntelliJ).
I then decided to master that new tool. Besides having the opportunity to increase my skills, they say that doing the same things in a different way is a great brain-training exercise. It helps to avoid and recognize bad habits one might have from using the same tools, everyday.
This question on stack overflow was one of the things that inspired me the most when I was wondering whether to buy ir or not:
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/21987/how-is-intellij-better-than-eclipse
Also, something that's been extremely useful for myself is a printed list of the hotkeys for IntelliJ. I used a text marker on the commands I use the most and reduced my learning time considerably. You can get an oficial KeyMap in this link: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/documentation/index.jsp
Another hint, by using: command + shift + A you can type any command available in the IDE, much like the ctrl-3 hotkey on Eclipse.
Well I'll keep posting my experiences with IntelliJ and hope to bring interesting facts and comparisons between those two amazing tools.
