I finally went ahead and bought myself a IntelliJ Ultimate License

It's a favourite of ours. People at the company Jetbrains have made changes and improvements to all of their products over the years and now they are even better.

Not a sales pitch: Jetbrains doesn't pay me for this, but they charge for the licence instead When I talk about the tools in this post, I'm talking about them as a fan and as someone who uses them a lot.

They have tools for every programming or devops need for every platform and language today.

In the beginning, I worked as a Java developer. Over the last eight years, I've learned about Python and Golang. I also play around with Node apps from time to time. I've worked with a lot of different UI technologies, like Angular, VueJS, and more. Now, my day job is in Python, and at night and whenever I have time, I work on open source Golang projects.

There were community and professional editions of each of these programmes that I used at my last job. I used them all. They gave us the licence.

The community editions are very good, and you can get a lot done with them. The professional/ultimate editions, on the other hand, are so great.

Why ultimate license?

First and foremost

The community version let’s you work on your projects, the ultimate version helps you in your project. There is a big difference.

One tool to rule ’em all

You only need IntelliJ, nothing else. I spent almost 8 hours a day watching at at this IDE window. You need a support for a tool or language, Jetbrains has it.

Sooo… many features

I will not even try to name the festures you get out of a ultimate licensed product. I will name a few.

For the full list go here:

• All frameworks (java, python, node, web) supported
• Profiling
• IDE sync
• UML diagram
• All application servers supported
• Scientific tools for python
• Duplicate detection
• Customer support

and so many. For the full list on IntelliJ go here.

Small things but mighty

All the small things that Jetbrains keep on adding in their tools, though they are small, but they are mighty. They range from adding a debug support for variable data line by line to adding a custom font for the editor or adding a new color scheme. Everything in this tool feels like geared for productivity and developer centric.

Use any professional plugin

If you get an Ultimate license in any product, you can use the professional plugins for other languages also. So even if I got IntelliJ license, I can fully use the other language plugins from the marketplace.

Fallback license

Once you pay money for the first year, they give you fallback license even if you stop from next year.

Continuity discount

From the next year it is heavily discounted, second year is 20% and third year onward it is 40% discounted. They call it continuity discounts.

Competitions

Intellij Community

The first competition is the community version itself. But I feel that I get so much out of a $150 for the first year, I should take it and settle the IDE battle on what to use.

Emacs

I am trying my level best to be a emacs user. I get it why people love it, but I am stuck at properly configuring it and be a productive emacs user. May be some day I will.

Eclipse

I started using IntelliJ from 2012. Before that I was using Eclipse on day to day basis and was not very fond of it.

The ever rolling and never ending progress bar which used to run in the main UI thread and while it was running I could not do anything. That was the biggest gripes I had about the Eclipse tool set. I haven’t used Eclipse for a while, but as afar as a IDE goes Eclipse is still one of my favorites till date.

Netbeans

I never really understood Netbeans. I don’t see too many people using Netbeans still on day to day basis. They have moved under the umbrella of Apache and made a change overall in the product. I got excited and installed it a few days back. To my surprise, I found the IDE itself didn’t change at all. Stil the same boaring look and same boaring fonts.

VS code

If one IDE has the future of being a big competitor of Jetbrains, then that is VS Code. It has a opensource community and gets continuously updated. New features come everyday. Microsoft has really done it this time. But personally, I never really loved VS Code, I like it as a text editor, but not as an IDE. It has a long way to go. It really lack that WOW factor, personally speaking.