https://www.codecademy.com/courses/learn-java/articles/what-is-an-ide
I just finished this article and it recommends that I download and use IntelliJ as an IDE for Java development. I’m hesitant to do that because I’ve invested a considerable amount of time setting up and learning to use VSCode, which was recommended in other courses I’ve taken here.
Would I be fine to continue using VSCode for Java development or are there some good reasons to switch between VSCode (when I’m writing HTML, CSS, Javascript) and IntelliJ (when I’m writing Java).
What are people here doing? Are they switching back and forth? Are they sticking with one or the other? Thanks for your thoughts.
VSCode is a code editor, not an IDE. For development, I would use something like IntelliJ which is also a code editor but is collaborative. Or I guess if you want to stick with MS, you can use Visual Studio and Azure for deployment.
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I had the same questions, as I just recently started using Java for school. But if you don’t want to learn another code editor like IntelliJ—for the time being—VSCode does have extensions for Java. You can find information on that: here
But if you think you’ll be spending a lot of time on Java development, it may be beneficial as Java is not an innate language for VSCode as it is with other editors. 
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IntelliJ isn’t solely a code editor. You would use IntelliJ (or something similar) at work to develop, debug, collaborate, deploy code. For ex: I used to use it to view what our code changes would look like on our integration website before we pushed the code to production (live site). That way, we could see if there were any bugs and then fix before any changes went live.
As always, read the documentation.
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