I recently started using IntelliJ ultimate, and for the most part, I find the experience superior to using Eclipse. It has taken me some time to figure out the equivalents of a few things, but overall the learning curve was fairly minimal.
IntelliJ's code completion in particular is phenomenal compared to Eclipse's and I love the general layout and theming options (Darcula in particular).
However, there is one thing in particular that greatly annoys me about Intellij IDEA: the performance of "hot swap" is not so great compared to Eclipse; in Eclipse almost the same moment I save the file changes show up in my Java application, in IntelliJ, I have to "save", "make project", and then wait a few seconds before the changes show up. Since I mostly work on desktop applications, having a rapid "hot swap" loop while debugging is incredibly important for productivity.
So right now I find myself bouncing back and forth between both IDEs; I prefer to use IntelliJ when I need to write large sections of code, but when it comes to debugging, I end up using Eclipse instead because of the superior experience for "hot swap".
There are a few other minor annoyances like the lack of an option to reformat files on save like Eclipse does, or a minimal "new java class" dialog compared to Eclipse's, but overall I don't feel my money was wasted on the Ultimate edition.
I was wondering if anyone else has found ways to improve the performance of "hot swap" or knows of upcoming work being done on that feature?