Back when the rest of my team used Eclipse were content to go to standup on a regular basis and say “yeah, I didn’t get much done yesterday because my Eclipse was broken much of the day.” IntelliJ seems… a little better now that most of my team uses that. It seems like when it’s broken, it’s not a complete “well, I can’t do shit now” situation. But I’ve still seen so many devs say “I’ve got red squiggly underlines so I can’t build” and I’m like “just go to a shell and run ./gradlew build” and it works fine. As in, the problem is IntelliJ thinking something’s wrong with the codebase and/or build file, but the repo’s fine. It’s just IntelliJ that’s borked. And that slows developers down too.

So, at least one of the reasons why I wouldn’t be open to using anything heavier than Vim (without any plugins or addons or anything) is because I can almost always count on Vim to work. It’s dependable. IDEs take too much work to maintain and when something goes wrong, it sucks way more time than does hunting down the import path for the class DefaultSpringContextWidgetDoohickeyInverseButtholeInspectorImpl.

Plus, I like taking the time to learn the path. Not that I always remember the full import path of something like that once I’ve looked it up forever. But if it’s the sort of thing I’ll import fairly frequently, I like to reinforce it in my wetware grooves.

Spend more time reading documentation basically. You quickly learn what is available when you have to spend time looking it up. autocomplete is a nice speed boost but if it breaks and you cannot do anything then maybe you should spend some time without it and learning to lookup/read the docs. Quite often the docs give a lot more details about how things should be used that autocomplete cannot convey. IMO you should see it as a nice reminder of things rather then the main way you learn about APIs.