Notepad++ vs IntelliJ IDEA

Notepad++ has built-in support for syntax highlighting for a wide selection of programming languages.

Notepad++ is a very light program that starts almost instantly. This makes it a great text editor for users that want something that will start the second they open it.

A list of hundreds of plugins is maintained.

You can get a portable version of N++ and put it on a flash drive or your dropbox account and have your editor, configured the way you like, at any computer that you are on.

Notepad++ is licensed under GPL, which means it is free/open source software that you can use freely.

In Notepad++, the user can utilise regular expressions to quickly modify text across multiple files.

If you close Notepad++ (npp), your documents remain even if you haven't saved.

You can define your own custom syntax highlighting rules (or add support for others) .

Very easy to use and personalize.

While it is disabled by default, when enabled, it is possible to edit more than one line at a time. This is helpful in many situations.

The user can open and edit files in multiple screens within the editor window.

If you have the Plugin Manager installed you can search for MarkdownViewer++ and install it via that plugin.

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.

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.

A very complete development environment support.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Verify yourselves as a student to get more perks.

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.

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