IntelliJ user here. Both on Windows (personal) and Mac OS (work).

I never understood why people use the terminals built into their IDE. Can you explain the use case for this? Genuine question.

I do certain stuff via the command line and other stuff via the IDE. But switching between windows and just using the native tool for its own job seems the most natural to me. Is there some sort of awesome integration or something that I'm missing out on?

One reason is to be able to full screen the IDE and use its built-in windowing/paneling for editing and terminal.

That seems to intuitively make sense as a want, if I consider the fact that many other devs tell me that they never want to leave their IDE, even just to open a PR or whatever.

Is this windowing support somehow superior to using regular windowing and shortcuts? I ask because I personally find that getting used to a new set of shortcuts takes considerable time and creates frustration when you mix em up. I switched to IntelliJ from eclipse and wanted to learn IntelliJ native shortcuts instead of using eclipse settings. There's something to be said for everyone to 'speak the same language' when interacting and helping each other.

Anyhow back to windowing, I personally like to just have whatever application I use to be open full screen (minus any menu bars, docks etc). and having the same set of shortcuts to interact with any window (CMD-TAB or CMD-~ works the same on all of them - substitute CTRL-TAB for Windows) is awesome. Similarly I know some people use a tiling window manager and I would gather that it would even be beneficial if each internal window in IntelliJ could be detached and arranged by that window manager (sort of like Photoshop/Gimp does on Mac) using its own shortcuts.

An example in frustration for me is the debugger in Chrome. The times I've closed the Chrome tab because I wanted to close the open file (which looks like a tab to me) with CMD+TAB is staggering ;)

Caveat: I might be biased by seeing people awkwardly click around to find the right internal window and then the terminal or other tool is way too small to be useful if you ask me.

Another 'integration' into IDEs that I don't understand is the source control. They also in many cases rename functions which makes for awkward conversations. Though they seem to learn e.g. people have an easier time now to find the function in IntelliJ if I ask the to show me the 'git blame' as it's called "Annotate with git blame" now. Whether a current employer gives me Windows, Linux or Mac OS, I work on Java and have IntelliJ or do whatever else, using command line git and gitk and Kdiff3 will always look and behave the same.

I've never quite figured out the advantage to these integrations, either. The only "terminal" that I use occasionally in an editor is BBEdit's "Shell worksheet", which is actually just a plain text document that will send the current line to a shell when you press ^Enter and paste the output into the document starting at the following line. (This is equivalent to Emacs's Shell mode; I don't think I've seen it in other editors.) And I only use that in cases where I want to capture terminal output and do stuff with it in a text editor because, hey, it's right there.

And, so far I've never found a source control integration that I really like more than using command line git or, on specific occasions, standalone git GUI clients.