Excellent dark mode, free for students, easy to use and powerful interface

Applications like Eclipse, Webstorm, PHPStorm, Netbeans, Aptana, Zend Studio; these are integrated development environments otherwise known as an IDE. This means that it is not only where a developer writes code but it also integrates with version control, frameworks, debuggers, and compilers.. they were originally conceived for such purpose. Generally, all of a developers activities can be conducted from within the environment.

An editor may have these same features available as plugins but they are designed for the primary purpose of being editors.

To maintain quality, there should be a clear separation between alternatives to editors and alternatives to IDEs.

Many of the alternatives listed here are editors, not IDEs, so they are not a good alternative.

Moving from Eclipse (STS) to IntelliJ, was for me moving from being blocked 2 days a week to being continuously productive. What takes hours to fix in Eclipse simply works in IntelliJ. Your company owes it to you to buy a license. Could not recommend more.

The commercial edition (Ultimate) is definitely worth its money. There is a special license for individual developers at about half-price, and an Academic license for students and teachers at a fraction of the costs. Free licenses are available when used for teaching/training and for Open Source projects.

In any case the increased productivity easily justifies the license costs IMHO.

I'm using IDEA since nearly 10 years. It was the first Java IDE which understood Java. Even the free Community Edition is, regarding its Java support, far ahead of Eclipse and Netbeans. Hence we stick with IDEA.

Comparison of Ultimate Edition (paid) vs. Community Edition (Open Source): http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/editions_comparison_matrix.html

IDEA was a ground-breaking Java IDE during its first years and blew away its competition. Its advanced code inspection and refactoring tools were umatched. It always has been demanding on resources but delivers great productivity in return. While Eclipse has caught up feature-wise and might have advantages due to its plugin based architecture and large community, IDEA is still my number one choice by far!
The community edition is quite limited and misses nearly all important components for server-side development.

Very good IDE that is very complete for Java. Sometimes it feels like IntelliJ is a "role-model" for Eclipse.