One or two years ago when I did desktop development stuff at home I used Eclipse because of its elegant UI. Actually, I decided to use Eclipse at home because its GUI was more appealing to me than IDEA. After some experiments with Eclipse I found out that it's not as productive as IDEA. However I sticked to it at home because I liked its UI. That time I had to do some J2EE development at work mainly Web development and I used IDEA there and I was happy with the amount of productivity I had. Now that I'm doing Web development at both of home and work I'm realising that I have to leave Eclipse for IDEA at home too. I don't know about future. Now that the guys at Eclipse are working on adding Web Application development support to Eclipse things may change. But for now, IDEA is more productive than Eclipse.