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I finally put my money where my mouth is and bought a license for IntelliJ. I have been using it for a while now (on eval licenses and at work), so I thought it was about time to buy a copy for my personal projects. Luckily for me, JetBrains were offering a special start-of-year deal, so I managed to get it for less than 200 hundred pounds (the dollar being as weak as it currently is helped here!)

I find it hard to spend (a relatively large amount of) money on software with so many cool open source/freeware alternatives available, but for IntelliJ I made an exception. The fact is that despite trying long and hard, I have never totally got on with Eclipse. Yes I know it can do all that IntelliJ does, can be mapped to use the same keyboard shortcuts etc, but it is just no where near as polished and easy to use, plus it always runs far to slowly on my Mac.

For many years I shirked IDE's altogether (preferring my trusty TextPad!) as I just found that they 'got in the way of productivity', but IntelliJ has changed all of that for me. Not only does it not have an adverse effect on my productivity, it in fact increases it.

Well done to JetBrains for releasing, what I consider to be, a high-quality product that is a joy to use.