NetBeans has greatly improved its usability over the years. It always had a huge advantage over other IDEs due to its modularity. But the keyboard shortcuts and workflows did not feel natural to most programmers. At one point the NetBeans engineers decided to model themselves after IntelliJ IDEA. The pop-up menus suddenly had the exact same items as IntelliJ's. To me this change was very welcome indeed, as I was used to working with IntelliJ. We have muscle memory and once we have internalized a keyboard shortcut, we often use it without thinking. Sometimes IDEs have the same keyboard assignment for very different actions. For example, in IntelliJ CTRL+D duplicates a line, whereas in Eclipse CTRL+D deletes a line. The exact opposite. This makes it challenging to swap easily between IDEs. Making NetBeans the same as IntelliJ was a smart move indeed, considering that IntelliJ is probably the most popular Java IDE.
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