> I could live with Eclipse though, despite SWT being also quite removed from the native experience.

How can SWT be removed from the native experience when it uses native widgets everywhere, as opposed to Swing, which reimplements them all in Java (the reason why Swing apps are so ugly and feel so non native)?

I had that feeling using eclipse and netbeans for years before switching over to IntelliJ.

What OS do you use? Because Swing is especially shitty on Linux, so I simply can't switch.

Ah yeah. It looked really bad on my ubuntu box. Moving to OSX was a help

Maybe have a look here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6840935

Trust me it has less issues than SWT. Such as https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=13819

The global menu was a bad move on the part of Canonical in Ubuntu's Unity desktop. I don't even use it or that ridiculous scroll bar. I keep those packages removed on my systems so my Unity experience is closer to Gnome and Eclipse and other GUIs that had issues with those UI elements also fair much better.

Either way, that has to do more with issues in Unity than in SWT. What SWT accomplished is amazing:

http://www.eclipse.org/swt/

Java also hates Xmonad (I spent ~30 mins trying workarounds and then gave up, as each time it went wrong, I had to restart my session)

I haven't messed with my xmonad.hs in a long time, but adding

  setWMName "LG3D"

to my startupHook fixed most of the issues for me.

I had to install kde as I couldn't get matlab working in xmonad. Found out about this fix only recently.

Another thing worth a try: export _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1

Worked for me last time I checked (Arch, xmonad 0.11-7, openjdk 7.u45_2.4.3-1, intellij-idea-community-edition 13-1)

what was the issue, are you using openjdk or sun/oracle jdk?

That's exactly the reason why I've always returned back to Eclipse. I just hate Swing. It's slow and ugly on Linux.

I use it in both environments and have no issues with the L&F.

You might find some tips in here: http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-57233

I think this answer could help you: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/24231

NetBeans is Swing, too, and looks quite beautiful and native.

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.

Netbeans' profiling stuff is separately available as VisualVM, and has decent plugin integration with IntelliJ.

Does the plugin version also support remote profiling the way Netbeans does?

>> 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.

What do you see as the advantages of Eclipse over Intellij?

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.

Recently using IntelliJ on Linux and fonts got better with this:

http://superuser.com/questions/614960/how-to-fix-font-anti-a...

My only wish for Eclipse is that it doesn't have Eclipse as a build dependency. However weird that may sound.

How is this useless comment at the top?

It got there by expressing a common sentiment.

Now, what business does your content-less (and insulting to top) comment has on the thread at all?