A Plea to JetBrains

I’m back doing some Java work at the moment and although coding in Java feels somewhat like trying to speak with a mouthful of peanuts – compared with Ruby – I’m rather enjoying it for some perverse reason. That said, my long-time trusty steed in such endevours is really beginning to annoy me. IntelliJ, once the lean, mean, IDE has porked out considerably over the last few releases. It seems that in competing with Eclipse, it is becoming Eclipse: fat, bloated and slow.

IntelliJ has become a bit like Micro$oft Word: I only ever use 5% of the features – and that’s just the features of which I’m actually aware; I’m beginning to need the 2GB of RAM in my laptop just for IntelliJ; oh, and SVN+SSH integration just plain sucks. I’ll be sticking with the command-line version thank you very much.

It’s all very well and good to have all these nifty tools, etc. in the IDE but seriously, I never use them. Nor, for that matter, do I want to get into the habit of doing so for one simple reason: I have command-line build tools so that I may run the build on any machine, at any time of the day, even gasp when there is no IDE involved nor a programmer to be found.

So here’s a plea to JetBrains: I paid good money for your software and I’ll be more than happy to continue paying good money if you’ll please oh please let me turn off all those features that make me feel more like I’m using WSAD.

What’s next, Perspectives? Gadzeeks!