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I just recently switched from Eclipse and JDeveloper to IntelliJ Idea, i have heard a lot of fellow programmers praise the paid version as the best IDE available, but as far as i have been able to work with it (a couple of days now) i haven't found that feeling yet, so i'm obviously missing something, or haven't worked with the IDE enough, thus my question is:

What are the most powerful features of IntelliJ Idea?

jhurtado
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    See [***How are IntelliJ and Eclipse different?***](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/21987/how-are-intellij-and-eclipse-different) and [***Things possible in IntelliJ that aren't possible in Eclipse?***](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/239732/things-possible-in-intellij-that-arent-possible-in-eclipse) – Christopher Peisert Jul 05 '12 at 02:51

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If you just switched to IntelliJ from Eclipse, one thing you could be tempted to do is to enable Eclipse shortcuts. Don't fall into the trap as there's a lot more standard shortcuts in IntelliJ and by changing the keymap you will miss some of the cool stuff for sure.

I've put some of my favorites down here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

It is a subjective feeling, but navigation looks very powerful in IntelliJ & live templates are a bit more convenient to use. Debugger has its own shortcomings compared to Eclipse. There's a number of other small things that are quite nicely implemented in IntelliJ out of the box, but the biggest difference is probably how IntelliJ handles the context: Why IDEA is better than Eclipse

Anton Arhipov
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Long time IntelliJ user here (~12 years+). It really is a personal thing, so for me it's shortcuts, auto formatting, live templates, themes (I prefer dark editors) & a decent debugger (with watches and evaluations). Newer intellij features that I have used of late are the ability to run two projects in different windows (couldn't do that before). It's just a neat package all round and have never had the urge to change.

d33j
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