As someone who has used Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ for years I can say that without a shadow of a doubt that IntelliJ is far ahead of the other two.
The only areas where Netbeans is ahead is built in tools for profiling tools and heap dump analysis, and wizard for visually creating a GUI. I can't think of a single area where Eclipse is better except perhaps number (but not quality) of plugins.
>> As someone who has used Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ for years I can say that without a shadow of a doubt that IntelliJ is far ahead of the other two.
Wow it's like different universes. In mine, Eclipse and even NetBeans are far ahead of IntelliJ. The Eclipse maintenance staff has a bit of a cocky attitude but Eclipse is rock solid, mostly. At least, I can forgive its warts.
For me it's SWT - on Linux it's faster, the look & feel is consistent with the environment, and most importantly - font rendering. Fonts look really shitty in IDEA / Linux.
The only areas where Netbeans is ahead is built in tools for profiling tools and heap dump analysis, and wizard for visually creating a GUI. I can't think of a single area where Eclipse is better except perhaps number (but not quality) of plugins.