I want to make it crystal clear that I mainly use IJ for AS3 / Flex / AIR development. With Moonshine not mature enough and Flash Developer being a rather unfriendly bunch of batch scripts that one would have to edit for things to kind-of-work, IntelliJ IDEA (plus the Flash/Flex/AIR plug-ins) stepped in to provide a solution, any solution at all. It was an IDE that *somehow* filled the gap for AS3 / Flex / AIR developers after Flash Builder left the stage. It will be on GitHub soon, look for ciacob/SIRIUS It was so bad that I started to build my own AS3 / Flex / AIR build engine it overcomes the above problems and I can use it in place of IntelliJ's build & pack functionality.

I love IntelliJ IDEA, even if I am constantly frustrated that I have nobody to blame for a lack of productivity but myself.Comments: Extremely bad experience. Nowadays, 18+ years later, I know the key commands and I know the tool fairly well, and I finally feel like the only bottleneck in my development cycle is me, not the tooling. Every release featured integrations for new technologies, some of which I didn't even know I would want to use until they showed up in IntelliJ IDEA.

In 2002! In Swing!) and it was feature-packed. It's always been polished (it had transparent UI panels. I used IntelliJ IDEA and haven't looked back. 'I first tried IntelliJ IDEA when the Java Developers Journal or Java World or some such journal awarded it the 'best IDE' in few years later, Apache Maven got good and suddenly the teams I worked on could ditch the corporate mandated IDEs (like JBuilder!), whose configuration file droppings teams had to version control, and embrace their preferences, like IntelliJ IDEA.

Cost of intellij idea ultimate