Is Eclipse worse or something when doing Android dev? It seems just fine to me doing normal Java dev, but to hear people talk it is the worst IDE ever invented.
I wouldn't say Eclipse is worse for Android dev, but I've defiantly seen 12+ year Eclipse Java developers hanging over my shoulder as I power though IntelliJ saying things like "How did you do that?" and "What IDE are you using?" I would say IntelliJ can make you more productive out of the box, whereas you may need plugins and some config to do the same features.
I have the Ultimate Edition, but I would definitely check out the Community Edition if all you're doing is Java.
Most IDEs just use some kind of project file, or are able to use directly build tools. But Eclipse always has to create this workspace full of metadata that it likes to corrupt every now and then!
you can specify the workspace locn at startup (with -d iirc) so with an alias and/or some bash scripting you can use a separate workspace for each project (I have my projects in ~/proj as subdirs with commands to select which is current - although I only use eclipse for c dev work, intellij idea for java + python).
also, use a separate build tool (eg ant) and don't store build info in eclipse (basically, use as default a config as possible and "import from" the build tool). then if you do need to start from scratch you lose very little (and don't add the eclipse metadata to git).
Given I've had a lot more experience with the FlexBuilder fork than mainline Eclipse, I always found it incredibly frustrating compared to VS. Now, VS doesn't have all the features that are in other IDEs, but getting out of the gate is downright painful by comparison.
I've used WebStorm (also based on IntelliJ) for NodeJS dev, and like it a lot. I still like VS more, but VS is so slow and buggy by comparison, it's hard to use these days. So I can imagine that this new variant will be very useful, and far better than Eclipse for the same work.
It's much of the same, really. You'll only notice you are doing Android development when you debug and it starts an emulator instead of a Swing app or web server.
