On the other hand, they are notoriously slow to develop their IDEs. Features are super slow to be delivered, IDEs themselves are not really improved as well. They are focusing on things most don't care: Spaces, new UI project, etc. Barely any performance improvements, customisation is hard, Ruby, Scala and other plugins are lacking as well. Scala showing red squiggly lines where its not supposed to (on their compiler), Ruby lacking ergonomics in refactoring department (refactoring too large scope and etc.) or tooling support.
I still pay Jetbrains and while 2015 they were above everything else – its no longer the case. I grew up with them as developer, I hope they can up their game.
I found that IntelliJ IDEs for me are almost at the perfection level. I don't really need any new changes, except for simple incremental ones like supporting new languages.
I've been using IntelliJ since 2003, and it's amazing how little my main workflows have changed since then.
For example this https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-39449/Deleting-param... has been broken for 4 years.
No point in buying Intellij Ultimate and installing language plugins. As is clear from this post, the language plugins will no longer see new features.
Now you need to purchase and start the IDE's for Rust, Go, C++, Python, etc. So if you are working in multiple language projects, you need $$$ purchase power. And then 64 GB RAM and several terabytes of hard disk space.
What a mess.
I would also argue that their IDEs are largely mature, feature-complete software. I'm quite happy they haven't succumbed to the modern trend of reorganize all the menus every 6 months.
From where did you get this idea -- basic use? It most certainly is not this to as great a degree as you might like to think. Source: JB employee.
Same, so they do it every 2 years instead.
But the upside is the Shift+Shift Menu of "Find anything in this Project or what the IDE can do for you"... I wish more software had this :)
Depends on the language.
I use mostly Scala and Rust and both have significant issues still with incorrect syntax highlighting, refactoring being limited and slowness with larger projects.
I have used clion with rust plugin and while it's better than nothing, it's generally been pretty spotty on all the features, completion, marking errors, refactoring. I'm looking forward to RustRover "pulling a GoLand" by bringing a proper IDE experience to rust.
It’s incredible to me how many people choose VS Code because of its aesthetics, so it is by all means the right thing to focus on.
No. VS code is popular because it's
1. Free and open source
2. Come with a lot of official extension [1]
3. Backed by MS which has the incentive to commondize code editors
It's quite similar to Chrome.
[1]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/publishers/Microsoft
Different product teams work on different plugins/IDEs. Though, it's apparent that the more popular languages (Python/Java/JS/.NET/Go) get more enhancements. Makes sense for Jetbrains though because those languages provide them more revenue with a larger user base.
> Spaces, new UI project
Jetbrains Spaces is Jetbrains branching out into SaaS. The new UI work has been going on since as long as I remember. They're always tweaking the UI, but that's the norm in the industry.
Slow means stable. I don't understand how people rate software on this. Lot's of updates to a product means to me that the product is faulty.
However they already told in plain text that the Rust plugin will be stopped at this point of time, so this is another quite expensive (for me) tool to buy if you'd like to develop home projects or learn at home
After a year I didn't extend the license, however.
You see, I am mostly retired and program just for fun. And CLion does not do enough because I also write TypeScript, PHP, shell scripts, and even C sometimes. CLion is good for C, but now, I don't know if RustRover will cover C.
Now I switched to helix. Thirty years ago I learnt Emacs and later jed. You could say I am the pinky finger guy. In my fifties I decided to try something completely different, a modal editor. It took more than a year to slowly learn tricks. If programming were my job I wouldn't do that. I would stick to vscode or just Visual Studio or to a JetBrains product, because I know them and can work efficiently. With helix I did not yet reach this efficiency. But being retired it is more about fun instead of efficiency. helix is just more fun than these corporate offerings. Last week I switched Caps Lock and Esc and even created tap keybindings for the modifier keys (right tap-iso = open bracket, right tap-meta = close bracket for example). I am still in the process to adapt to the new keybindings but it makes me smile.
One caveat: when in a browser text input field, I sometimes hit the i key before typing. Anyone know this? I realized, I have to shift the mental model that browser text input fields are alreay and permanently in insert mode.
This said, I have a fond spot for JetBrains even if I left them.
Now, I use Helix too — it's not perfect, lots of quality of life features are missing, but upgrading _one thing_ and having it work correctly is really a pleasure.
Do you by any chance have your hx config open source? Would love to browse it and maybe steal some of your config!
I added foot.ini but not evremap.toml and my xkb keymmap because these are not yet finished and very hacky.
https://gist.github.com/nalply/239c1e2ed13f5cb8ec4f3873fe64d...
CLion is the wrong product if you want to work in multiple languages. JetBrains has different IDEs for different purposes. You would want IntelliJ Ultimate and to use plugins for TypeScript, PHP, and even Rust with the plugin: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/22407-rust
If you only wanted to work in a single language you can get that specific IDE.
You can also buy the all products pack to get everything they offer, which is a great deal.
Disappointing that the open source plugin is a casualty, but this is probably a net positive for getting Rust into more hands that might need it. Writing Rust with and without IDE help is a night and day experience and having an official, goto, commercially supported product is great news.
Then they started "simpler" IDEs like PHPStorm, but that was fine because I could supplement my IntelliJ with plugins that would basically give me PHPStorm and the like. IntelliJ remained the go-to tool for the polyglot.
The problem were the bugs. 3-4 years sometimes to fix glaring bugs well reported. Some were unheard.
They also made a big spiel about their millisecond to rendering right about the time where I switched to a 4K screen that rendered the IDE completely dead on its knees. The irony! Turns out Java wasn't so good for IDE in macOS retina displays.
You'd code in windowed mode, fine, you stretched open the IDE to fill the screen and every key stroke would then take seconds to render!!
Then one day, C-Lion.
All the sudden, we need a brand new IDE because you know, C++ is that different. OK fine. I don't plan on writing C++. Still though, felt like a cash grab. Then AppCode, then a plethora of other IDE that just feel like cheap IntelliJ-light opportunity to make money.
So I moved to VSCode, grudgingly. Had enough of unanswered bugs, poor performance and focus on everything else but the product that got them there.
VSCode is kinda great. But it's a perfect example of how much Microsoft could strap rockets to pig and make it fly. It's fast. You couldn't write a editor that fast using that technology.
But still VScode irks me with the MSFT part and the future enshitifcation that is all but inevitable.
Recently I found Zed [1]. Zed is what I wanted VSCode to be, and I highly recommended. Sadly it's still lacking in many languages like PHP but I hope one day they get there, because it's absolutely stellar.
I believe it's written in Rust and supports Rust really well. Give it a go. I can't tell if they'll be around in 5 years but I sure damn hope so.
So I'm sorry but I fell out of love with Jetbrains. And you might thing this is a cheap shot but I gave them well over a thousand dollars.
[1] https://zed.dev
But there are many annoying issues open for a long time, two I'm struggling with currently :
- integrated terminal rendering performance is atrocious (and I hit this all the time since I use CLI a lot in my workflow)
- remote editing is a false promise feature - it's been there for a year but it's not even close to usable - this is a big deal for me as well and VS code is immeasurably better in this regard
I did a lot of C# recently and (ironically) VS code is terrible for this kind of language, Rider > Visual Studio.
I'm doing some Python now and PyCharm is just barely edging the VS Code. The remote experience is just not comparable and the terminal rendering performance is PITA.
If I was doing TS I wouldn't even bother with IntelliJ.
MSFT standardised LSPs with the language server protocol (well, literally).
So if anything, Jetbrains knows C# just as well as MSFT ever have!
re:VSCode: did you have any problems with ~~Atom~~ or Sublime Text? I love VSCode, but those tend to be the competitors that come up when talking about it. They lack the trillion dollar corportation attached to them so you may like them.
EDIT: oh it turns out Zed was made from the creators of Atom. I guess this is in good hands, in that case.
EDIT2: Darn, mac only for now. I guess I just have to wait. Also, I had no idea how much drama happened in the years since I last used Atom. I guess that recommendation is a no-go.
Looking forward to install RustRover. Hopefully it will bring even better integration with Rust than using CLion with Rust plug-in. And CLion with Rust plug-in is already very nice :)
https://blog.jetbrains.com/rust/2023/09/13/introducing-rustr...
A big part of why I use VSCode over JetBrains stuff is that I only have to deal with one application for all my things.
IntelliJ (and I assume Fleet?) is an all encompassing IDE where all the languages are plugins and can basically do everything the other products can do. The language specific IDEs are mostly skins for the plugins that just rearrange the UI to make it simpler to do specific things. Features may land first in the language/platform specific IDEs
I use Intellij Ultimate on a Python codebase and it can rather annoying on the odd occasion to get the project loaded up right compared to PyCharm. I get there in the end, but it can get fiddly.
But I'll point out the multi-IDE licence from JetBrains doesn't cost much more than an Ultimate licence, well worth going for of you're a routine polyglot programmer.
I think the question still stands though; what's the point of continuing to do this? I guess there must just be a subset of IDE-users who want things tailored extra to their specific language, even if they could get all the same functionality in a broader IDE like IntelliJ?
Genuinely curious what people like about something like PyCharm professional enough to pay for it, and whether they also use other IDEs or basically use it like IntelliJ (I assume you can get plenty of plugins for other things you need, like JavaScript/TypeScript).
The current clion + rust plugin combo allows me to step seamlessly from rust to cpp when doing ffi work. Hopefully this isn't lost in this new rust only tool.
Android just has some absolutely mindblowingly insane dependency graph and long-running steps in their build process, making even gradle sweat buckets. Without a significant re-architecture, Bazel wouldn’t fair any better, while a significant re-architecture could just as well help Gradle.
I tried it out 3 or 4 months ago, and I didn’t find it useful, nor familiar - kind of feels like a VSCode wannabe.
It was disappointing to see, as I am really tired of running multiple IDEs to work on mixed language projects.
- Auto-completion: However smart it is, it can't beat copilot.
- Type information: LSP can do that. (along with access to docs, error/warning highlighting, etc..)
- Debugger: There isn't a good one (or at least a good one that can be easily configured) for neovim yet. That's something I really miss for my toolbox.
- Cargo.toml: There is already a neovim plugin for that!
- VCS: I don't mind having a separate app for VC. But there isn't a good GUI app for Linux.
So far, it's only two points I am interested in; and only the debugger is the thing that I miss the most. I am wondering if better debugging tools (like LSP) somehow make it to Rust (along with maybe ownership/lifetime LSP like tools), then the market for an IDE becomes null?
That's news for me!
I write C# in Rider and I'm a copilot subscriber. However if I have to choose between Rider's auto-completion and Copilot, then the choice is painfully obvious.
Trouble is it depends what you program.
For example if you're a Go coder, then JetBrains GoLand has no competition.
Sure you might try VSCode with various extensions, but its not the same. GoLand enables you to be much more productive because of its first-class integration with Go.
The only reason some people use VSCode instead of GoLand for Go coding is because its free. There's no real reason to use it otherwise.
Err, what? There isn't even an argument here, "GoLand only supports Go so surely it must be better at it!".
> The only reason some people use VSCode instead of GoLand for Go coding is because its free. There's no real reason to use it otherwise.
The feature set listed on the site looks identical to that offered today by Rust-Analyzer or the existing IntelliJ-Rust plugin. Except in practice, IntelliJ-Rust is significantly weaker at understanding Rust code than Rust-Analyzer, and the strides that they have made in the last few years have largely come down to piggybacking off of it.
And that's ignoring that I find IntelliJ's text editor to be vastly less comfortable than Emacs+Evil. (Yes, I know about IdeaVim. I used it for years. It doesn't hold a candle.)
"The [1976 Rover] SD1 went head-to-head with rivals such as the Ford Granada, Citroën CX and Opel Senator as well as premium models like the W123 Mercedes-Benz and BMW 5 Series – all of which still form the main alternatives. Unfortunately, the big Rover soon gained a reputation for poor quality, reliability issues and a propensity for alarming amounts of rust..."
Quoting MRandl comment from the blog:
> Bit of a malicious move, essentially monetizing the contributions of all the people who worked on the plugin while the open source part slowly falls into deprecation and wontfixes. Not cool at all!
If that's what we're calling "malicious" these days, then I'm not exactly outraged. Rather, I find it exciting that Rust has grown to the point where a commercial entity wants to commit to a commercial product like this.
The reason it feels malicious is because jetbrains weren’t the only contributors, so they’re monetizing the work of people that were under the impression that the plugin was staying open source due to clion.
While waiting, I did some work in neovim.
The only thing going for it was that the debugger worked better than gdb (although I think it uses GDB unde the hood, but probably does something better than when I manually fiddle with gdb)
VS Code is sometimes a bit sluggish when handling input. Don't know why, and it only happens on my Macbook Air, (so might be thermal throttling?) but it happens rarely.
The nice thing about Code is that it's also easier to work across multiple languages without having to switch tools.
However, it does say it's still in preview, so it might get better?
Also, the UI looks radically different (and nicer) than what CLion looked like, so maybe they have a new UI framework that fixes some of the problems I had with CLion
Its subtle stuff, but changing the way project management is handled and tasks are run for example between CLion, Idea and PyCharm made me use the individual IDEs even if I could technically install the language plugins in just one
I have an all products license so it's not a blocker but I wish they would just make ultimate, truly ultimate.
I personally prefer the segmented nature since it lets me more easily customize per language functionality.
But anyway, I'm kind of lost with this news, because I'm using paid CLion for both C++ and Rust, and it seems now I will need to buy another IDE (because they will probably discontinue the free rust plugin).
Uuh… sure, buddy. Just make sure to never mention it to anyone outside internet, ok?
