IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition 14.1.3

The installer takes up about 195MB of disk space and then expands into around 550 MB. The UI theme can be set to IntelliJ (default) or Darcula (black background, with orange keywords e.g. import, new etc,). The next phase of the installer is Default Plugins (Java Frameworks such as JBoss Seam, Struts, Spring, J2EE), and Build Tools (ant, maven, gradle) and Web Development (HTML, JavaScript). There is also IdeaVIM, a VIM plugin which is not recommended - even if you are familiar with VIM. A Scala plugin is also an optional extra.

IntelliJ Settings

Cntrl-Alt-S Open Settings

IDE Settings->General
IDE Settings->Appearance: Set "Use antialiased font in editor", Change L&F (Idea4.5 default).

Java keywords in IntelliJ are highlighted in a horrendous dark blue colour. To change them to a more palatable light grey we can do the following:

Cntrl-Alt-S Open Settings

IDE Settings->Colors & Fonts

Set the font to Consolas, and set Java:Keyword:Foreground to light grey. Then when you read the code you are not obstructed by the "noise" of Java keywords and can focus on the functionality.

Spring Framework and Aspect-Oriented Programming

IntelliJ has full support for the Spring framework which supports Aspect-Oriented Programing
(AOP).

AspectJ is another AOP framework.

The idea of AOP is an application or service has various "aspects" such as logging, perfomance monitoring, exception handling etc.

Dependency injection and AOP are complementary techniques.

IBM have a series of articles called AOPAtWork. Here is a sample article: "Say goodbye to scattered and tangled monitoring code, as Ron Bodkin shows you how to combine AspectJ and JMX for a flexible, modular approach to performance monitoring".

IntelliJ Keyboard Shortcuts

IntelliJ is a very fast editor from jetbrains and does remote debugging more than twice as fast as Eclipse. Searching is also slicker than Eclipse. Here are some handy shortcuts for jet-setting across your source code.

Cntrl-N Jump to class
Cntrl-E Scroll through open files
Cntrl-F and F3 Search and repeat last search
Cntrl-F12 Jump through class (fields and methods)

Alt-F7 Find usages (also click "Open in new tab" to get tabbed search)
Alt-left, Alt-right Scroll through panes (Cntrl-E if you want to jump >1 step at a time)
Cntrl-B Jump to DECLARATION
Cntrl-Alt-B Jump to IMPLEMENTATION

Alt-3 go to Find screen

The Cntrl-MouseUp/MouseDown combination can be used to dynamically zoom in/out of the current pane. This is the same key combination in Internet Explorer for the same operation.

The founder of JetBrains is Sergey Dmitriev whose hobbies include pure mathematics, including functional analysis. here's an interview with him. Official bio is here.