Before you throw the towel in for IDEA check out the beta of the new version that supports generics and such. It’s looking sweet, apart from, of course, the crap jaggy look & feel we’ve come to associate with Swing 
(I’ve just made an antialised look and feel based on Alloy and it looks lovely. Why doesn’t everyone do this? Why isn’t it built in to the JRE? Doh)
Cas 
Any chance of leting others use that L&F? I’m using the Kunststoff look and feel at the moment to get away from the drab grey look, but I’m always willing to give another one a try
I like the MetalLookAndFeel in Java 1.5, though it isn’t antialiased
Give over! Metal is hideous.
The trick to doing AA L&F btw is just subclassing the UI class and overriding paint() to set the antialiasing rendering hint on the graphics argument. Nothing more complicated than that.
Cas
Hmm, are we talking the same metal?, like this one:
http://www.matzon.dk/brian/Random%20Junk/metal1.5.png
if so, you have a weird definition of hideous!
THIS is hideous: ;D
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~dak/rack/images/fullrack.gif
btw, what single UI class? - there are a gazillion of them in the Metal L&F
Somewhat on topic: Sun to join the Eclipse Foundation?
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1460112,00.asp
That truly is a hideous interface.
You have to subclass ALL of the UI classes A major pain in the arse, considering how easy it is for Sun just to add the antialiasing flag to Swing in general.
Cas
I’m a netbeans man myself, largely because that’s what I use at work. The refactoring option can often totally screw up your code though.
I like Eclipse (but I’m thinking about switching back to 2.1).
Well, Im using Eclispe 3.1 and Im quite happy with it,.
It does do the ocassional lag which Eclispe doesnt, BUT oits also doing a lot mreo work as its watchign me code and offering to complete all sorts of thinsg for me as I go.
I don’t buy the “IBM did SWT because Swing was slow” argument. Swing’s been fine since 1.3. Rather I tink it coems down to fighting over platform control.
I use Eclipse. I like Eclispe. I write Swing code 'cause thats what I know.
Got to admit, SWT certainly looks neat but it looks a whole lot more fiddly and complicated than even Swing is… much more low-level looking.
I think it’s great that SWT is there though as a proper alternative to AWT and Swing.
Cas
I’m an Eclipse addict. I tried out some of the others, but couldn’t see myself as being more productive. That’s all that really counts right?
So that would make me the only person using JDeveloper, from Oracle.
Does all the things I need it to at work…BPEL, J2EE etc and is easy to get LWJGL up and running.
Andy.
Eclipse is definitely the best complete IDE I’ve ever used.
It still lacks a few key features, such as macroing (particularly quick macro recording). The inability to alt-select rectangular blocks of text is something I miss from other fully featured text editors.
For all of Eclipse’s strengths it still clings to the old fashioned idea of file based code organization. It does offer some pretty functional class, package, and heirarchy views. However you still end up dealing with individual files, particular during editing. Code folding aleviates this somewhat, but I find it a bit clumsy. What I’d like is a truly abstracted editor, where things like classes, methods, members, blocks, loops, conditionals, etc… really are first-class primitives in the IDE. I don’t care if it still needs to generate files on the backend to maintain compatibility with all the great compilers and tools out there. I personally don’t want to think in terms of files any more. Of course, this approach offers challenges by conflicting with the source control systems with which I am familiar.
ECLIPSE!
eclipse is really the best, if you have the hardware to run it. But on older computers its practically unusable, if only its hardware requirements where smaller it’d be perfect!
Eclipse is just the best!
That it is free is just mind boggling :-)… It beats all the you-have-to-pay-for-it ide’s I’ve used…
Column selection mode is about the only thing I miss… but I just copy the code into pspad whenever I need it, and paste it back again when done…
Netbeans since v4.x is great IMO. It’s fine for J2SE but also for J2EE. And it’s pure Java so no SWT native binding trouble. And the devs work a lot on it so it continues to improve in a fast manner.
Just my thoughts, no need for further discussion on the “why”…
Netbeans. I dont remember what, but i had lost time trying something with Eclipse, which i didnt find in it, so i just got back to Netbeans. After switching off unneded modules and adding startup switches, it can get quite fast too.
I must admit i like the nice plugins of Eclipse.
I’m still a die-hard Eclipse fan, but I wish they’d work on making version dependencies less critical. I’ve given up trying for now, but I’ve not so far managed to get the VEP working in the same IDE version as Cheetah.