But it feels like a slow errosion of our control and ownership of our tools. Where everything is becoming a rent-seeking opportunity and good tools are made available for a monthly rent.
Personally I like having my whole build system, IDE, CI/CD on a machine I work at. I get this might not be for everyone, but I think we need to be careful what we give up long-term for these conveniences.
Granted, I could just use VI and a terminal and nobody is forcing anyone to use anything ... but like many things, they are not like-choices.
I depend on my tools, and the fewer dependencies to paid-montly SaaS features the better.
The only thing slowing it down was developer rejection of the austerity of vim and emacs. That’s changing now with VSCode’s in-browser and SSH Remote support. That’s the golden path now at my work. Although we still pay for JetBrains licenses, the JetBrains workflow is quietly and unofficially deprecated.
They have to do this to stay relevant. And I’m glad they’re doing it, because I want my JetBrains-level capabilities back. VSCode doesn’t come particularly close.
Especially in corporate context this will be the future for compliance reasons. No more developers who accidentally have code on their machine and lose it. Less access tokens on the client machines etc.
Will be an interesting trend of going back to the mainframe ... and will be interesting to see how that will collide with developers who want to have control and chose their tools and setup.
We are losing control and open ourselves to the mercy of whatever company.
Google is a great example. Many businesses rely on their services but if some robot bans you then you are majorly screwed.
IMO there's no stopping this trend. However, there's a solution and that is having more choices and competition.
Personally I love seeing this option because it lets me run my dev environment in a local VM. Sadly, I no longer trust community-developed editor plug-ins or dev tools to be free from malicious code. We talk about the problems with npm dependencies all the time on HN. How often do you audit the dependencies of your favorite VSCode plugins? I simply don’t want that code running on my system with full user access, and this architecture lets me avoid that. Of course there are still risks with it having access to dev code, but reducing potential exposure is a good thing.
However this may now make it possible for a person who can't afford the hardware to make his own projects by renting the actual hardware a little at a time, as he has needs for it.
Gitlab codespaces works even if all you have is a locked down school issued Chromebook.
And it is not as if you don't have plenty of options if you want to run the entire thing on your own machine(s).
I like the term rent-seeking. I think conscious devs should be against this.
The server and client is by design separated, which potentially allows to run the server on some other host, and remotely connect to it.
But you can host your own server. And you can also just run it locally, and locally connect to it. You can even bundle it together.
I don't see how this is bad. Only if the server part would not be available to you, then yes, sure, this is bad. But otherwise, this is a very nice and flexible design.
As a student, I have a desktop at one of my parents' house that I can control over ssh, this kind of features make remote development much easier and is often needed when I run an intensive task for hours. The experience with VSCode over ssh is really great. Some have pointed out local VMs, which is another use for this.
So in general I am positive on IDEs that allow some type remote editing experience.
Same here. For me, it is the understanding that every bit of this 'convenience' is adding overhead and latency to what should ultimately just be a text editor with some degree of real-time feedback. I can barely tolerate RDP on a local LAN setup for writing code. Across the internet is a joke, especially if some corporate VPN is in the middle.
Remote tools are totally acceptable when a human isn't in the loop on every frame update. The laws of physics are never going to give us a win-win here. If you want remote tooling + cake (i.e., a low-latency UI experience that doesn't live local), you will need to start deploying this stuff closer to the users' physical locations.
You mentioned RDP which I wouldn't even start comparing to a setup like this. Obviously streaming individual frames, video and the likes over the network is a different beast than having an editor running on a remote machine and only stream commands and keystrokes. For example my ssh sessions don't usually involve a lot of lag and work just fine.
But the tradeoff is increased risk: a single point of failure, a reduction in agency, etc.
There's no one-size-fits-all answer to this question; it depends on the individual case (not just the product, but the customer)
I'd hate to see the existing IDEs like pycharm die
This was almost overdue. Since the beginning of Covid, the need for good remote code development raised quite a bit (at least for many people I know, including our team). When compared to VS Code and its remote editing over SSH, IntelliJ was really lacking. I know of a couple of people who went away from PyCharm just because of this.
Related reports: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-19752, https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-226455
I tried Code With Me but this seems limited to 10 minutes in the free version or so, and also not really intended for remote editing but more for pair programming.
> hosted in Space
What does this mean? I have not really explored this so far. Can I host private own Space instances? I can imagine this would be a requirement in many environments.
Is Space an alternative to GitHub or other hosting solutions? We would not want to move our code, issues and internal project management over to some other platform. We just want good remote editing support.
Will there be a free community version of Fleet?
Anyway, I applied for an invitation to Fleet Preview. Maybe I can get a chance soon to try it out.
What issues did they have?
PyCharm in particular has had a "remote interpreter" feature for a while which works quite well. The text is edited locally but the interpreter and libraries are installed on the remote end. It then brings back whatever it needs for code analysis, so performance when editing is the same as local dev.
The story isn't so great for other languages, though.
The ability to run extensions remotely is really nice. Sometimes I like to develop in my personal environment and running extensions remotely keeps my extensions' NPM dependencies sandboxed from my personal environment.
I might be a little paranoid.
This was the pain point. My local machine didn't have source code locally.
Maybe I was too lazy, but syncing code on both local machine and remote machine was painful.
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-256708
- Regression: Markdown preview vertical sync does not work anymore
- Makes editing long documentation files a pain, I have to use an external markdown editor now
- First reported 12 months ago
- Regression: Git actions don't work anymore when looking at the file diff window
- Breaks my reviewing workflow, I have to use an older version of IntelliJ (which of course has its own problems)
- First reported 3 months ago
This kind of bugs should be utmost priority, because they directly impact the cashflow.
I used to like Intellij but got fed up and just stopped using it. Dealing with regression bugs isn't worth it. An IDE should be extremely stable, releasing new features is great but it shouldn't be to the detriment of existing features.
While VS Code has great WSL2 support, IntelliJ IDEA can not even show proper error messages when opening Maven projects inside WSL2.
[1] See this highly voted issue: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-186988 (opened since more than 3 years already)
Like the OP I've simply stopped reporting bugs, because they don't get looked at for literally years, let alone fixed.
The product is OK-ish, the support is abysmal.
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues?q=by:%20albertzeyer%20
I don't want to sound too negative here though. In general, I'm very happy with IntelliJ, and I think it's currently the best available IDE for many languages (I care mostly about Python and PyCharm currently).
I’m still paying for IDEA Ultimate, but it's only because I’m waiting for a better IDE with a more fair subscription system (when I cancel the subscription that was at least 1 year long, I should have the LATEST version I’ve paid for, not the first one). I will try Feet, of course, but I have no high hopes nor trust for JB.
So personally I'm willing to extend some trust to IntelliJ.
As a product it's quite pleasant to use. For Java development it strangely lacks quite a few of the nicer features of Eclipse, but its good quality support for so many different languages (e.g. for Rust) compensates for that.
I also bought new hardware - and noticed no real improvement (something about a fundamental threading problem, I think).
About 6 months ago I was finally fed up and just accepted I would be slower and less productive in some areas for a while without ReSharper, but that it would be OK.
I still miss features from it on a daily basis, but overall I am now quite happy with vanilla VS2019/22 - and never want to go back to the lag-hell that is ReSharper.
Their own bug tracker is just very hard to navigate and I'm not interested in any of their web service offerings.
Glad they're rebuilding the IDE with modern feature sets with faster experience.
Hopefully they don't tie it up too close to their web offerings and make it more pluggable against other services.
Of course then you deal with the relatively high JB prices for everything (not including IDEs even) and vendor lock.
It still runs on your machine. But the architecture it's built on means that it can run anywhere. A similar architecture to VS Code where you can deploy the VS Code server in a docker container or a remote server and run the UI on your PC. You can still run the entire thing on your PC if you wish.
So long as they never remove the ability to run locally (they would be insane to ever do that), then I welcome this modular architecture that embraces standards like LSP.
Mainframes, UNIX via telnet/X Windows, UNIX/Windows via Citrix/VNC/RDP, now we have Cloud via ssh/browser.
I've liked JetBrains and I'm paying their license but the current $249.00 yearly fee is still too high and I fall back to VSCode frequently.
The $249.00 fee covers all of their IDEs but I don't need the .NET IDE's if I'm working on JVM languages or CLion or GoLand for instance. I was hoping for something like "Pick 2-3" IDEs for a certain fee, like say $129 for Scala, DataGrip & PyCharm, oriented towards common clusters of vertical stacks devs normally use.
I understand that $249 may not be a large amount for many folks here, but JetBrains isn't the only development tool I'm buying and supporting with a yearly license.
After 3 or 4 years, my annual resub for Phpstorm was like $60/yr. Upgrading to ultimate was like $30 more. Well worth the price.
I've tried vscode several times, once every few years. It's getting closer for sure but for now still requires a bunch of extensions and tweaking to approximate the feature set of IntelliJ.
Opening a project should bring with it all of the conventions for working on that project, along with plugins also.
Bonus points for auto format on save and other style enforcement tools to remove pointless nit picking from the PR process and focus on the intent.
[1] https://lp.jetbrains.com/projector/?utm_source=product&utm_m...
I have also observed that cloud coding environments (e.g. AWS Cloud9) have become more popular and I totally get why. Collaboration is easy and you can have a Linux runtime close to your production servers even though your programmers use Windows and Mac laptops. But I've always felt icky about putty my source code into some else's hands because who knows how trustworthy EC2 really is when you're working for an Amazon competitor ;) Or more generally, plenty of European companies have general rules that forbid you to put EU data onto US servers.
So I'm happy to see that JetBrains has reproduced the collaboration and Linux runtime features, while still allowing me to self-host things on a server that I fully control.
An editor that takes multiple seconds to start up doesn't strike me as "fast and lightweight".
So what if it takes 30 seconds to start if it's done once or twice a day (or once a week or less in my case). What the heck kind of environment are people working in or mindset are people in when they can't tolerate 8 seconds for their IDE to open? (And then use that as an argument why the IDE is inferior.)
- You could use this to remote into a CI build that failed
- You could use this to remote into a production environment that crashed. E.g., if an unhandled exception is thrown in a server, the process pauses and waits for a debugger to attach while the API gateway switches to another server.
This could merge the concepts of CI, production, and personal dev environment so that the only difference between your dev environments and production is the scale of cloud computing required.
And why the hell is selecting files yet another different way of doing what's basically the same task as elsewhere? I'd suggest they should be using the File Scopes feature except it's terminally useless, with it's wierd-ass, barely documented and inadequate syntax. I've never managed to get it to work adequately.
There seems to be a common failing with JetBrains product development, they try to rush out as many different features as possible, presumably for the purposes of marketing "tick lists", but many of them are poorly designed, bug ridden and never worked on after v1.0
IntelliJ - because all the alternatives are even worse.
For C# Rider supports Roslyn analyzers and code fixers as well, though I don't know with what performance impact (as ReSharper isn't based on Roslyn this results in all analysis work being done twice, which can be noticeable).
it is night and day..
i don't understand how people believe LSP is perfect, it is not, the API is broken, it missing a ton of stuff and as a result client implementations are often broken
They and I have a very different idea of what the word "immediately" means
Thin client hosting might be their Hail Mary.
Was getting worried about the communication about light code editors in the past and how those users don't understand what a good IDE is [1].
I very much welcome Jetbrains getting into the vscode / codespace / gitpod space, and creating a rocking product.
Looking this one with a lot of attention.
[1] https://twitter.com/fbricon/status/1308165808506507267?s=20
and no info on vim shortcuts and keyboard driven workflow
Not that I am a particular fan of web based apps, however, there are very significant use cases involved like hosting a JetBrains powered editor in the web.