Sublime Text vs Intellij IDEA

Sublime Text is very lightweight by default. Customization occurs on the fly thanks to Package Control.

Sublime Text has a minimap on the side that provides a top-down view of the file and keyboard shortcuts for most actions. It also supports a large number of languages and general text editing features out of the box.

Multiple cursors and column selection allows for versatile ways of editing.
ctrl + d will select the current word and each time the command is repeated, it adds the next occurrence of the word to the selection.
ctrl + click or middle-mouse click will place another cursor in the place that's clicked. Cursors can then be controlled together. This also permits selecting vertically.
ctrl + shift + l will place a cursor on every highlighted line.

Sublime Text uses TextMate's syntax declaration files to support new languages, it has all its menus and keybindings generated from JSON files, and it can be scripted to add new features using Python.
If Sublime Text doesn't support a desired language or feature, it's usually not long before someone implements it themselves - examples include the plugin package manager and the 'open in browser' command.

When you start using Sublime Text, it doesn't drown you in keyboard shortcuts or non-intuitive use-concepts. However, high-level functionality can still be easily accessed when the need for it arises.

Sublime Text looks consistently the same across Windows, OS X, and Linux.

Sublime Text allows for all sorts of customization to help users change almost everything in the editor: Key Bindings, Menus, Snippets, Macros, Completions, and many more. Essentially, just about everything in Sublime Text is customizable with simple JSON files. This system gives the user flexibility as settings can be specified on a per-file type and per-project basis.

Sublime is quick to start and never slows down. The UI is always responsive and you know what is happening in the background.

The package manager is a plugin and can be swapped with something else custom.

Sublime Text, while being lighter-weight than an IDE, still supports many IDE features.

• Text from the current file is used to provide autocomplete.
• Project Support (folder browsing, scoped history, build-system declarations).
• Refactoring support is emulated through multi-select, project-wide find and replace, and regular expression search.
• Syntax-aware selection and GoTo for quickly jumping to locations in the project.
• Snippets and Macros.
• A Python console for everything else.

Command Palette allows for fuzzy searching all available settings, snippets, etc.

All you need to do when starting up is to install a package manager and modify user configuration.

Regex commands help describe a certain amount of text.

From menus to commands, assign key maps to almost anything.

Settings are modular and can be shared.

Distraction free editing takes over your screen and removes every UI element so you can focus on code.

Choose from many build systems or craft your own.

A Sublime license can be bought but it can still be used for free. However, a pop-up appears when you save multiple times.

Open Goto Anything by pressing Ctrl or Command + P and by using fuzzy search you can look for a file in your project. The file will load even without pressing enter, so you can make sure you've found the correct file without committing.

Both of these programming interfaces are cross-platform, open source, and easy to use.

Provides command line shortcut for server upload.

Vintage mode is Vim-style editing that's already built into the text editor.

Sublime Text compatibility with Textmate bundles is good, but excludes commands, which are incompatible. In general, Sublime Text syntax definitions are compatible with Textmate language files (.tmLanguage extension).

Create your own theme with online editor.

With lot of functionalities, where other editor even not think to provide.

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.

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.

IDEA has a clean, intuitive interface with some customization available (such as the Darcula theme).

IntelliJ IDEA hardly ever crashes or has any issues that plague other Java IDEs like file corruption or slowness.

IntelliJ supports many languages besides Java, some of these are: golang, Scala, Clojure, Groovy, Bash, etc...

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.

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.

A very complete development environment support.

The documentation is exhaustive, easy to navigate, and clearly worded.

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.

These simplify the daily work, e.g. copy/cut a whole line without the need to select it.