Call me old, but I still use eclipse even for android programming (using the ADT plugin). Every IDE has pros/cons, and both eclipse and intellij have their shares, but if you consider the big picture, they mostly even out.
In fact, I would rather argue that the features on which intellij rules are of superficial nature and have more to do with a "nice feel" (such as more friendly code-completion or better looking graphics/colors).
But features that eclipse rules are more substantial (like performance, ability to work on wide range of projects).
The only reason that intellij appears to have more fanboys is that it doesn't come free. And its human nature that if you spend bucks on something, the free alternative will obviously look inferior to you!
Most Intellij IDEA users (including myself) are former Eclipse users. Could I go back to Eclipse? Sure, but I wouldn't be as productive with it as I am using Intellij. I found myself fighting the UI and configuration way more with Eclipse than I have with Intellij. This might not be an issue if using 1-2 programming languages, but if using more than that, it gets pretty tedious in Eclipse.
Used Eclipse for 3-4 years when I was a student before discovering Intellij. Haven't gone back to Eclipse since then other than just testing once or twice a year.
i have the exact same experience. Used to use vim as my editor for doing coding excercises for classes - switched to eclipse for bigger class projects. Started working, and got a chance to try out intellij (when it was at intellij 7!), and was blown away at the order of magitude productivity increase (which, i had to put some effort learning a lot of the shortcut keys, but was well worth it).
Now, when i use eclipse (e.g., conducting a job interview with a candidate), i find it's UI strange, lack of ease of navigation really off putting.
Just anecdotal obviously, but most of the people I know just use the community edition. That's free, so the money argument doesn't seem to make sense there.
Now yes, lots of people do pay for the ultimate edition, but I'm sure if people thought the free alternate was better, they'd use that over paying for something.
Most of the folks at my work just use the free version of IntelliJ instead of bothering to get a license from IT. Not sure your argument about it being $$ driven holds water
In my experience, Eclipse performs far better than IntelliJ and the UI is more responsive. Probably because Eclipse uses SWT instead of Swing (which has another benefits as well, like better font rendering in OS X).
As a former Eclipse+ADT user, the key advantage of IntelliJ is stability. Eclipse+ADT crashed daily for me. IntelliJ might crash once a month.
Given that the Google team is also shipping all of the new features for Android development in Android Studio first, you are giving up a whole lot more than just a few nice to have look and feel features by staying on the deprecated dev system.
It was a pain in the ass to learn a new IDE, but as a professional Android developer it was a must to stick with the mainstream toolset.
Same for me, used it without a license for several years and then two months after I finally bought one, I switched to Emacs. It also seems like development of ST3 has once again ground to a halt, no new beta releases since July.
The biggest thing I like about intellij over eclipse is that it uses the java and maven versions I want it to, instead of ecj and a bundled maven. This probably doesn't affect many, but was constantly a problem on some weird legacy projects I worked on. I agree that the other differences are largely superficial. (I've yet to pay for intellij)
In fact, I would rather argue that the features on which intellij rules are of superficial nature and have more to do with a "nice feel" (such as more friendly code-completion or better looking graphics/colors).
But features that eclipse rules are more substantial (like performance, ability to work on wide range of projects).
The only reason that intellij appears to have more fanboys is that it doesn't come free. And its human nature that if you spend bucks on something, the free alternative will obviously look inferior to you!