Benefits of switching from Eclipse to IntelliJ IDEA for Android development

I switched to IDEA for my android development.

• Intellisense actually works
• IDEA is much faster
• The refactoring is nicely done, and the "inspections" catch a lot of places where refactoring would make sense

Things I miss:

• The new Layout viewer from Android 3.0. I always modify the layout xml, but it's nice to be able to switch over and get an idea of what it will look like without running the app. I do load up eclipse for this reason when I do heavy layout editing.
• Hover documentation. In intelliJ, you have to press ctrl+Q to get the javaDoc of an existing method call (vs intellisense popping up as you code).

I have used both, they aren't that different. A lot of it is just what you are used to. Personally, if you aren't having any problems with Eclipse, I would not suggest switching. There are no advantages that are worth the learning curve.

The only benefit for me: You code as fast as formula 1 :). Really. If you're used to Resharper in .NET programming, then you will code as fast as in .NET. Even faster.

Bad thing: lack of some Eclipse's tools (browse my questions for details) and it seems that Eclipse's compiler--which you can use from IntelliJ as well--is better. Because of the lack of some tools you are forced to use many 3rd party tools.

The bottom line is: if you don't have problems with Eclipse, then stick to it. I hated Eclipse's slowness and that's why I moved to IntelliJ.

EDIT 23 Jan 2013

IntelliJ has improved a lot. They now have UI visual editor, a great connection to Android SDK and at this moment I can't really think of any feature which Eclipse has and IDEA does not have. What's better, I will say again that IDEA has more features than Eclipse.

EDIT 11 Mar 2014

Again IntelliJ improved. With its visual UI editor for XML layouts and itself being used as the base for Google's Android Studio, its still the best IDE around.

The only flaws for Android developer are IMHO:

• it still does not perfectly import dependencies (libraries) so you have to fix things manually

• it does not perfectly recognizes other projects (modules) which sometimes you have to add those modules manually

• a support for Google Glass does not exist

All this is referring to when importing projects made in Eclipse, which happens very often to anyone working on multiple Android projects.