A comment to a previous developer blog post asked: "What is best IDEA or Eclipse? I'm thinking now what i will use ;-) but i can't make my choose(sic) ;-(" Matt's response to that comment was appropriately diplomatic, but a recent exchange in Atlassian's internal blogs might shed some more light on the issue.

It started innocently enough with a piece of friendly advice from Cenquan-Atlassian, Brendan:

If you've ever noticed IntelliJ IDEA 6.x/7.x not keeping sync with the file system on OSX, even when the "refresh" button is pressed, there is a workaround: disable the bundled native fslogger. This native monitoring app reportedly uses a nonstandard mechanism to monitor file system changes, which may or may not be why it seems not to notice when I update files/directories external to IDEA.

removing fslogger:

1. shutdown IDEA
2. cd /Applications/IntelliJ\ IDEA\ 7.0.1.app/bin/
3. mv fslogger fslogger.DISABLED
4. restart IDEA

I've been running without fslogger for a solid 5 minutes without problems. YMMV.

It didn't take long, however, for the first comment from Atlassian's small but vocal Eclipse contingent, represented by JIRA developer Brad:

Or there is this other workaround

Brendan's response was a little... vehement:

...must ...resist... obvious... ...troll.. eh, f— it: I'd rather chew my own leg off than use that steaming pile of bloated-design-by-committee-why-use-1-dialog-when-500-will-do-piece-of-corporate-code-monkey-shit.

Chris Owen's a little less so:

I'm not sure whether you would emphasise or de-emphasise the work in workaround

Meanwhile, Andreas had to get a word in on behalf of the freetards:

Yet another workaround...

Then Steve, Sysadmin extraordinaire, took the argument up a notch:

[The eclipse] link didn't do anything useful for me. I think this is the one you wanted.

And from there, it was always going to be a straight downhill run towards Godwin's Law. Me:

YM http://www.gnu.org/software/ed/ HTH, HAND.

Tom Davies:

cat >Foo.java

Me again:

Brendan:

Chris:

And finally, Steve:

Wearable computing FTW:

The moral of this story? "Never ask a nerd for advice, for he shall say both yes, and no, and 'get a real computer'".