Personally I'm happy with how IntelliJ IDEA looks on my Mac or on my Ubuntu.
It can be sluggish but I've never met an IDE that isn't sluggish and that's worth the price of me not using a text editor such as Emacs.
This "Java UI" that they use give them a competitive advantage - it makes it easier for them to support multiple platforms. I'm happy that I get to use the same IDE on multiple OSes, as I routinely use multiple OSes (e.g. for work I now use OS X, for personal projects I'm using Ubuntu Linux and from time to time I use Windows too).
What other IDE has a comparable feature set, works on Linux, OS X and Windows and does not suck like Eclipse does?
Except when it remembers on a full moon to blow your metadata directory or the broken interaction between its worspace builders and external building tools.
Rich Geldreich, the guy from Valve working on their Linux OpenGL debugger uses Qt Creator and looks really satisfied:
I've been using QtCreator full-time now for 6 months and I think it's awesome. I would buy it in a heartbeat, but it's a free download and it's even open source.
A bit of the background behind my need for a VS alternative: For more than a decade I've been using Visual Studio (since VC5 I think), and various other IDE's from Borland/Watcom/MS before that. [...]
It can be sluggish but I've never met an IDE that isn't sluggish and that's worth the price of me not using a text editor such as Emacs.
This "Java UI" that they use give them a competitive advantage - it makes it easier for them to support multiple platforms. I'm happy that I get to use the same IDE on multiple OSes, as I routinely use multiple OSes (e.g. for work I now use OS X, for personal projects I'm using Ubuntu Linux and from time to time I use Windows too).
What other IDE has a comparable feature set, works on Linux, OS X and Windows and does not suck like Eclipse does?