Perforce integration sucks

Not sure if this is my configuration or IDEA itself, but Perforce is pretty much unusable for me inside IDEA. I have a hell of a time getting logged in when I start up. After a few tries I seem to get connected, but no obvious reason as to why.

The bigger problem is that I can't submit changes. I'll edit a file, go to check it in, and it will politely refuse citing the non-fact that there are no differences.

Vim plugin

Hold the phone. I just found something that absolutely rocks. There's a vim plug that maps the IDEA keystrokes to vim's. That is AWESOME!

I realise that this is a niche feature that only some people would like, but I have never been able to edit text as efficiently on anything as I have on vim once I learned all the obscure keystrokes.

Save = Save All???

You have got to be kidding me. It seems that somebody at JetBrains decided that Save and Save All were redundant, and merged them into Save All.

I could live with this (barely) if there was a setting to switch the behaviour of teh Save button, but I can't find it.

Please please please JetBrains... do not tell me how I should work. Give me the tools and bugger off. Thank you.

What a PIG!

A picture is worth a thousand words... this is Activity Monitor showing IDEA and Eclipse 3.5, with essentially the same project (actually the Eclipse workspace has several more projects in it). Both are idle.

Project view or Package view

Seems like there's nothing in between project view and package view. I mean, I *want* to see all my packages in a nice flattened hierarchy, but that doesn't mean that I don't also want to see stuff like my pom.xml and log4j.properties. Switching back and forth is a PITA.

I have to set up Perforce *every* time.

To be fair... I have to do this on Eclipse as well, but it's much easier to have a single Eclipse workspaces with all my various projects in it than it is to have an IDEA project with all my modules in it. Typically I have a single workspace for all my work projects, but this is much harder, or maybe even not possible (multiple versions of the same module) in IDEA.

It's probably worse than just having to set up Perforce, but so far I haven't got any other "global" settings. Once I try to explore maven on IDEA, I expect this will bite me again.


-- edit: It's even worse than I thought... I have to set it up separately for every new module under my Project. Grrr......

Switching to IntelliJ IDEA

Someone had the IDEA (snort, chortle, giggle) that we need a corporate standard for our Java IDE, and decided that instead of the two completely free ones, it should be the one that costs $600. Presumably we got a volume discount, but still....

So, having endured the pain of learning one complicated IDE (Eclipse), I now have to learn another one which doesn't seem to offer any obvious benefits.

Two weeks in, I am finding myself fighting this stupid thing to just get my work done. Learning curve aside, I am bumping into things here and there that piss me off because Eclipse did it better.

In fairness, there are things that IDEA does better too, but so far the minuses -- for my usage -- outweigh the plusses.

This is my place to rant.

webapp to context mapping is one to one

I miss having some way to deploy a webapp module in my project to multiple contexts. I have a simple redirector webapp which I used to deploy to several contexts:

/css
/js
/img

All it did was proxy the request to another server, based on the hostname.

Seems like I'll have to re-write this module and hard code my paths, and then deploy it to /. Good thing I don't need to do this with two modules.