all-IT

Was it the beginning so that by far the best IDE for Grails was IDEA, the free Eclipse gets more and more. No later than the change of Grails developers to SpringSource and the associated integration into the Eclipse-based SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) , a lot has happened.

Aside from the main memory - Hunger of STS, I feel as old Eclipse users in good hands. With NetBeans and IDEA I could never really get used.

To enable Grails to support the Grails and Groovy on the Extensions tab extensions of the STS dashboards are installed (see screenshot). Then there are for Grails projects its own perspective, with syntax highlighting, code completion and a clear navigation in the Project Explorer.
In the toolbar there is a button in the Grails perspective Grails commands to execute (such as run-app ).

When installing the Grails Extensions is the installation directory of the current STS Grails saved version.

  springsource / ~> Ls spring / source
    grails-1.3.5
    grails-1.3.6				
    grails-1.3.7
    maven-2.2.1.RELEASE				
    roo-1.1.0.RELEASE			
    tc-server-devel-2.0.4.RELEASE
    sts-2.5.0.RELEASE 

Are there any updates (Help -> check for updates), a new version of Grails there is this added. In the Preferences (Groovy -> Grails) you have to take the new version of the workspace. The Grails project is still the upgrade command is necessary.

Conclusion:
The Grails integration into Eclipse has taken a big step forward. From IDEA functionality should still lead. Grails projects there are only supported in the paid version ULTIMATE.
The free development environment NetBeans and Eclipse-based STS hardly differ in the Grails support. Here the personal preference will decide on the IDE.

Links:
Talk about this topic on stackoverflow.com