When comparing Homebrew vs IntelliJ IDEA, the Slant community recommends Homebrew for most people. In the question“What are the best power user tools for macOS?” Homebrew is ranked 2nd while IntelliJ IDEA is ranked 37th. The most important reason people chose Homebrew is:
Homebrew makes it easy for people to quickly install any open source software (that is contained within the apps repositories) for Mac.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Quick access to a large repository of open source software
Homebrew makes it easy for people to quickly install any open source software (that is contained within the apps repositories) for Mac.
Pro Easy to setup and use
Once installed, you control Homebrew using the brew command. You can find packages using brew search, install them using brew install and remove them using brew uninstall.
Pro Open Source
Pro Less maintenance than Macports
Macports seems to be able to get into a bad state where new packages are unable to be installed, or installed software was unable to be updated. This simply hasn't happened with Homebrew. In addition to not having to deal with corruption problems, Homebrew installs packages in userland. Not requiring root to install software is a big win.
Pro Builds quickly and requires few dependencies
Homebrew as much as possible uses already existing libraries and tools to install software thus making builds quick and requiring few dependencies.
Pro Unintrusive
Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local
. Homebrew won’t install files outside its prefix, and you can place a Homebrew installation wherever you like.
Pro Does not require using sudo
One of the things to like about Homebrew is that it refuses to run things under sudo
most of the time. This is a great policy, but it causes issues when you want to create symlinks or install in places that SIP has changed permissions on.
Pro Homebrew tries very hard to use existing tools and libraries
Homebrew’s recipes try very hard to use the existing tools and libraries in OS/X, so they tend to build much faster and require fewer dependent libraries.
Pro Smart refactorings
IDEA places an emphasis in safe refactoring, offering a variety of features to make this possible for a variety of languages.
These features include safe delete, type migration and replacing method code duplicates.
Pro Fast and smart contextual assistance
Uses a fast indexing technique to provide contextual hints (auto-completion, available object members, import suggestions).
On-the-fly code analysis to detect errors and propose refactorization.
Pro Android support, JavaEE support, etc
A very complete development environment support.
Pro Support for many languages
IntelliJ supports many languages besides Java, some of these are: golang, Scala, Clojure, Groovy, Bash, etc.
Pro Lots of plugins
Many plugins are available for almost any task a developer may need to cover. Plugins are developed by Jetbrains themselves or by 3rd parties through the SDK available for writing them.
Pro Stable and robust
IntelliJ IDEA hardly ever crashes or has any issues that plague other Java IDEs like file corruption or slowness.
Pro Intuitive and slick UI
IDEA has a clean, intuitive interface with some customization available (such as the Darcula theme).
Pro Clear and detailed documentation
The documentation is exhaustive, easy to navigate, and clearly worded.
Pro Very powerful debugger
With ability to step into a certain part of a large method invocation (Shift+F7), drop frame, executing code snippets, showing method return values, etc.
Pro Free version available
There is a free community edition (open source) and an ultimate edition, which you can compare here.
The ultimate edition is available for free for one year for students but must be registered through an .edu e-mail account.
Pro Many convenient features
These simplify the daily work, e.g. copy/cut a whole line without the need to select it.
Pro Gradle support
Pro Built-in Git support
Pro Student Benefits
Verify yourselves as a student to get more perks.
Pro Embedded database support
Creating an embedded database, running SQL script in a dedicated terminal, viewing tables and their contents, and creating a connection to an in-memory or embedded database is fully supported.
Pro Prices are not bad
I pay $24 a month and i have access to all jetbrain peoducts , so i use their many tools , i tried many others like netbeans , eclipse , etc , they re good but intelij is on the space and the sky is the limit . Been using it for 5 years and i cant tell i got frustrated using .it
Cons
Con May cause issues when trying to create symlinks or installing in places where SIP has changed permissions
One of the things to like about Homebrew is that it refuses to run things under sudo
most of the time. This is a great policy, but it causes issues when you want to create symlinks or install in places that SIP has changed permissions on. (Alternatively, you could install Homebrew somewhere other than /usr/local
, but that might break various packages that depend on having stuff in and relative to /usr/local/
.)
Con Command line tools for XCode required
Once xcode is installed you can install Homebrew, including new(er)/different versions of most of the build stuff that xcode-select installed, like a newer gcc, newer git, etc.
Con Relies on outdated system libs
Con Slow startup
Startup can be slow depending on system configuration.
Con Uses a lot of RAM
Con Somewhat expensive
IntelliJ IDEA is fairly expensive, with a pricetag of $149/year.
However there is a free community edition available.
Con Built with closed source components
The version with full features is not opensource. Parts of the code are under apache licence though.
Con Cannot open multiple projects in the same window
Con Lack of plugins
IntelliJ supports a very small amount of plugins. Although these are 'quality approved', many features are missing and can't be implemented because of that.
Con Bugs are not solved as often as they should
They are more interested in adding new features or issuing new versions than solving bugs.
Con Standard hotkeys behave differently
Seems like hotkeys assignment in Idea has no logical consistency.
Like «F3» is usually next match, «Ctrl+W» - close tab, etc — they map to some different action by default.
There is a good effort in making the IDE friendly for immigrants from other products: there are options to use hotkeys from Eclipse, and even emacs. But these mappings are very incomplete. And help pages do not take this remapping into account, rather mentioning the standard hotkeys.
So, people coming from other IDEs/editors are doomed to using mouse and context menus (which are rather big and complex).