[HN Gopher] Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code
___________________________________________________________________
Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code
Author : regexrex
Score : 237 points
Date : 2021-03-06 14:03 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (archive.vn)
(TXT) w3m dump (archive.vn)
| izacus wrote:
| At the end of the day JetBrains doesn't own a whole cloud office
| suite that can finance and price dump their competition in the
| IDE market. They can fight against Microsoft, but US corporate
| consolidation will make sure that their competitor can just give
| out "good enough" product for free and destroy their revenue
| source.
|
| They'll either go out of business or get bought out by another
| corporate conglomerate and their products released for free.
| bungula wrote:
| According to Jetbrains' own surveys, VS Code is indeed growing in
| popularity - from 7% of Python developers in 2017, to 29% in
| 2020, while Pycharm remained at about 33%:
|
| https://www.jetbrains.com/research/python-developers-survey-...
|
| https://www.jetbrains.com/research/python-developers-survey-...
|
| https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/python-developers-survey-2019/#...
|
| https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/python-developers-survey-2020/#...
| jbritton wrote:
| I have had VS Code load the wrong version of a file. I'm not sure
| whether it's loading an older cached version or loading a file
| with the same name from another folder. The first time this
| happened and I couldn't resolve it, I put away VS Code for a
| couple of years. I tried VS Code again after forgetting all about
| why I deleted it. I got burned by the same problem. You can
| navigate right to the file you want to open, and it opens
| something else.
| naavis wrote:
| Never seen this happen. Maybe try to reproduce it
| systematically and post a bug report?
| sdfhbdf wrote:
| Different problems require different tool sets.
|
| The debate seems similar to some language comparison like
| JavaScript vs Go. There is a place for each - IDE and a Code
| Editor, Interpreted and Compiled - and for every problem - big
| corporate project, small open source repo you should just use the
| appropriate tool.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _GitHub is now a MS property, so in the future VS Code is
| expected to be more and more integrated into GitHub. That pretty
| much catches all the young and hip audience in a MS owned
| behavior loop. Which certainly shows some very competent
| strategic planning._
|
| And so, it baffles me even more that AWS weren't in the
| conversation to acquire GitHub (or if they were, that they failed
| to acquire them). Seems like a huge miss to me.
|
| > _Meanwhile, JetBrains seems to be staying afloat mostly thanks
| to hard work and sheer luck._
|
| Setting aside their colossal IDE efforts for a minute, Kotlin and
| the ecosystem JetBrain's building alone shows their level of
| competence. Truly amazing to put in so much effort while also
| making the business work. I mean, in a world of F/OSS languages,
| frameworks, and IDEs this is no mean feat.
| sidsidev wrote:
| Yeah or Google. They stopped Google Code (or whatever it was)
| to move it all to GitHub; I just assumed they'd then buy
| GitHub. Felt like a much more natural home for it.
|
| Maybe Gitlab?
| spullara wrote:
| The price they paid is much higher than what Google could
| reasonably do. They are not a developer focused company like
| Microsoft.
| parhamn wrote:
| I use IntelliJ daily. I think when LSP gets there VSCode can
| catch up and fill the IDE gap, but until then it doesn't come
| close to IntelliJ in terms of functionality (though sometimes the
| perf of IJ makes me want to switch but it has been feeling a lot
| better on the M1).
|
| LSP needs to make 2 major improvements in order to to get wider
| adoption:
|
| - Improve package/runtime support detection (Go modules, npm,
| virtualenvs, etc). IntelliJ shines here.
|
| - Create one bundled cross-language LSP container or something
| that all the editors out there can use. Currently its a mess to
| configure and run all the language servers and what not. This
| leads to a broken half-assed end-user experience.
|
| Once #2 happens, I think the whole editor ecosystem will feel a
| lot better for all the editors. Everyone is poorly reinventing
| the wheel right now.
| Strum355 wrote:
| Outside of the JVM space, I share the complete opposite
| sentiment. Go and Rust support in the past few months (close to
| a year at this stage) have been vastly better with LSP than
| with intellij (or the more specific products). Rust-analyzer
| literally just works for me with the vscode rust-analyzer
| plugin (intellij wouldn't work after a few minutes of googling
| etc, not a great experience) and I've consistently seen Goland
| be outperformed in OOTB experience by gopls, as a highly active
| member in Go online communities catering to helping many new
| developers.
| hctaw wrote:
| This comment doesn't make much sense. LSP is just a protocol,
| implementing package detection is the responsibility of the
| language server.
|
| The second thing you're asking about sounds more like a unified
| LSP client which is totally possible. It would actually be
| pretty easy. VSCode could actually improve this a lot since
| language clients are mostly boilerplate.
|
| All that said I think you're undervaluing what LSP/DAP actually
| gets you. It's a language agnostic API for PL tools, which
| includes compilers and virtual machines. All you need to be
| able to do is parse JSON and you can begin writing a reactive
| compiler that integrates into any code editor.
| thedevelopnik wrote:
| This is interesting to me and makes me question what I missed
| on setting up JetBrains products. I moved away from them
| because of their lack of support for standard tooling like
| eslint and pep8. It felt like JetBrains editors wanted me to
| set up lint rules by their spec and I had to set it up in their
| editor configs.
|
| I've always been able to add the VSC plugin for a language and
| everything just works. With JetBrains it felt like the first
| thing I was gonna have to do on every project on every one of
| my computers was set up a bunch of custom scripts to do really
| basic stuff.
|
| To be clear, I really am questioning what I missed, not the
| parent. Everyone here says Jetbrains is more convenient and I
| felt like my first task was always 3 hours of setting it up.
| parhamn wrote:
| > I moved away from them because of their lack of support for
| standard tooling like eslint and pep8.
|
| Sounds like something went wrong. These both get auto
| configured for me. I even get correct completion suggestions
| to disable the rules inline or at the file level for both
| eslint and pep8. The only thing I've had difficulty with is
| Prettier but that was improved recently. Email is in the bio
| if you need any help :)
| hit8run wrote:
| The original text has been deleted. Here is the copy:
| =============================== Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code
|
| The story of IDEA vs VS Code is a story of low-end disruption,
| straight from the textbook. There is an emergent competitior that
| is not yet feature-rich but it is not elephantine yet and its
| technology has an unique advantage. The key technology here is
| probably the Language Server Protocol; it offloads programming
| language related smarts directly to the compiler (typically),
| thus relieving the IDE from supporting a hundred programming
| languages with all their warts and twists. As the compiler is the
| ultimate authority on the matters of language, that seems like a
| wise move: reusing instead of reimplementing. The other
| technology is Electron and, by extension, a browser engine based
| GUI. Given how much money was put into browsers, that is probably
| the most mature multiplatform GUI framework in existence.
|
| That situation may catch the IDEA family between a rock and a
| hard place: it has to outdo compilers on one side and browser
| engines on the other side. Specifically, in their primary line of
| business. Which may easily become an unwinnable bet.
|
| So far it looked like textbook low-end disruption, except for one
| thing: the disruptor is an old fat incumbent while the disrupted
| party is a (relatively) young emergent competitor. That is the
| funny part. Clearly, the MS leadership has read the book.
|
| What bothers me about JetBrains is the fact that they seem to be
| playing along. Judging by the talks on their recent conference,
| IDEA goes more elephantine, more corporate, more complex. That is
| easy to understand: a corporate user pays a lot. But, that is the
| classic low-end disrupted trajectory that leads to the very same
| corner where IBM DB2 sits. They will retain some deep pocketed
| customers, but all the interesting things will be happening
| somewhere else.
|
| In this regard I will mention two announcements: the CodeWithMe
| technology and a lightweight "IDEA viewer" product. CodeWithMe
| allows one IDEA instance to run another instance remotely to
| allow for collaborative work. Even the color scheme and the
| shortcuts are provided by the master instance, if I understood
| that correctly. That is very Java and very corporate, no doubt.
| The IDEA viewer is another step in the same direction: let the
| IDE run somewhere else, maybe on a server, and let people use a
| lightweight client "on a laptop in a cafe". I seriously doubt it
| will work well in an average cafe though. Their WiFi tends to be
| unreliable. Given this degree of dependence of the client
| machine, spotty WiFi will cause a developer to smash his laptop
| against the coffee machine. Then, the developer will have to pay
| for both. I experienced similar issues with JetBrains YouTrack in
| the past: it was an awesome issue tracker, unless you use a poor
| connection or the server is too far away. Then, it was unnerving.
| So I assume, that will be stress-free on a wired connection only.
| Whether the developer is using a laptop or a workstation is of
| secondary importance then: it is wired. Still, that feature fits
| some corporate behavior patterns, so it may entrench IDEA better
| in that environment.
|
| In addition to the rock and the hard place, IDEA seems to be
| caught in one more aspect. GitHub is now a MS property, so in the
| future VS Code is expected to be more and more integrated into
| GitHub. That pretty much catches all the young and hip audience
| in a MS owned behavior loop. Which certainly shows some very
| competent strategic planning. Meanwhile, JetBrains seems to be
| staying afloat mostly thanks to hard work and sheer luck.
| polyterative wrote:
| For my everyday use the little features, customizzation and
| shortcut integration make jetbrains the winner
| fearface wrote:
| C# and F# support is vastly superior in Rifer to the VS Code
| epxerience.
| fabbari wrote:
| This! I have been trying to switch to VS Code for dotnet core
| projects, wanting to ditch Visual Studio. It's clear that
| Microsoft is - willingly? - keeping VS Code an arm and a leg
| away from being close to Visual Studio. Refactoring is a hit
| and miss, the language server will randomly need kicking, code
| completion is at times outright trying to sabotage you -
| inserting random classes - and the whole experience makes
| impossible to consider switching to it.
|
| And even their poster child language, Typescript, is handled by
| the code editor in a manner that's borderline unusable. If you
| ever used WebStorm the inability of VS Code to autocomplete
| with types defined in the same project is mind boggling.
|
| All this said I still reach for it a lot, until I have to stare
| at a red file with an error on a line that's no longer there
| until you restart the whole thing and question my sanity.
| tester756 wrote:
| You have better experience with JS/HTML/CSS in VS than VS
| Code?
|
| that's unheard :o
| beyondcompute wrote:
| I am wondering a bit what is meant here by "disruption". As I see
| the situation, some people seem to believe that as professionals
| we don't necessarily have to use "the best tools available" and
| if you can save a little by getting "almost as good (after some
| tinkering)" it's more than acceptable.
|
| My view is that if "a real IDE" (I use quotes as this is
| subjective and said in a bit of a tongue-in-cheek manner) gives
| you even 3% performance boost, it's well worth paying 100 euro
| per year especially if you are making tens of thousands using it.
|
| Overall though this "IDEA vs VS Code" situation is interesting
| because it reveals something about cultural situation in the
| developers' community.
| cedricgle wrote:
| My take with VS Code is that their support of development
| container and ssh is the best and it's a killer feature.
|
| My ultimate goal for quite sometime now was to pack all my
| development dependencies inside containers or cloud-init files to
| keep my host bare-bone and have reproducible/shareable setups
| anywhere anytime. Before I was an Emacs fan. I tried multiple
| combination of Emacs, Tramp and containers but it failed: there
| always was a package that didn't played well and kept looking for
| stuff at the wrong location. After a while, I was fed up to make
| low-level fixes in random packages. I also tried weird setup with
| Nix for the same exact bad result.
|
| So I took my nerd pride away and tried VS Code with containers
| and ssh: - https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers -
| https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh
|
| It just worked. The experience was flawless. In a matter of
| second, it blew the competition away like nothing. Nowadays, I
| cannot live happier: I clone the repo i need to work. It comes
| with a development Dockerfile. VS Code starts the container and
| everything is there for working. If I need a beefier host, I spin
| up a cloud VM with cloud-init and 5 minute later the setup is
| ready without any manual intervention. Any extension I tried in
| marketplace worked.
|
| In my opinion, the Emacs/Vim communities clearly missed a golden
| opportunity for a more larger adoption.
| rcrisan wrote:
| Fully agree. Also, if you need to debug your code that runs in
| kubernetes pods, VS Code also smokes other IDEs. In my case,
| not only the API calls are forwarded from the cluster to my
| debugging session but I can also consume during debugging some
| Kubernetes services by using their DNS names. Just awesome.
| newlisper wrote:
| _In my opinion, the Emacs /Vim communities clearly missed a
| golden opportunity for a more larger adoption._
|
| They just copy their init.el/vimrc to the server, Emacs/Vim
| users have been able to do this (coding on remote environments
| without all the kludges) since forever ;) and personally, I
| find it superior to vscoce's remote plugin since your editor
| and tools sit on the same machine.
|
| For GUI editors, I agree that vscode's remote development
| extension is a killer feature and nothing can't match it today.
| unchar1 wrote:
| > They just copy their init.el/vimrc to the server, Emacs/Vim
| users have been able to do this (coding on remote
| environments without all the kludges) since forever ;) and
| personally, I find it superior to vscoce's remote plugin
| since your editor and tools sit on the same machine.
|
| Unfortunately this doesn't work well if your connection has a
| high latency though, which I think is what VScode does really
| well.
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| I desperately wanted VS Code's remote development functionality
| in IDEA, and was keeping track of their remote development
| feature in YouTrack. When CodeWithMe was released, I was sorely
| disappointed.
|
| All I wanted was my code to run anywhere, and my local machine
| to be the IDE.
|
| mutagen.io ended up being my answer. After learning how it
| worked, I got it set up and it works really well. I'm mostly
| doing PHP development these days, and have a LAMP stack running
| as docker containers on a server.
|
| The sync is nearly instant (99% of the time), the rare
| conflicts are easily resolved, and of course debugging still
| works.
|
| The only thing I'm missing is collaborative editing, which I
| still have to jump over to VS Code to do. I haven't tried out
| two people using `mutagen sync` on the same instance of code,
| but that could be a really interesting solution if it works.
|
| An editor agnostic solution to collaborative/pair coding would
| be really fantastic.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| I've spoken to some Jetbrains employees and it seems their
| vision of remote development is nothing like what VSCode
| does. No matter how much I explain they just don't seem to
| understand the advantages of being able to host the IDE in a
| docker container/remote system. "Docker isn't supposed to be
| used for that, you deploy to a container, not develop inside
| one" they say.
| crummy wrote:
| Jetbrains Projector seems to be their solution. It runs the
| IDE on the server, and renders the GUI in a browser. Seems
| experimental so far, I'm running it at home and it's
| surprisingly far along but still ... Kludgey? A great POC.
| bootlooped wrote:
| I agree 100% that being able to work on a project that actually
| lives on a remote server, or on Windows subsystem for Linux, or
| in a container, is a killer feature. It's really awesome. It
| still wasn't enough to tear me away from GoLand though. I hope
| JetBrains implements something similar, I think they may have
| done so already in a limited way for certain languages, but
| it's not on VS Code's level if I recall correctly.
| brzozowski wrote:
| The author frames this as a contest between two architectures:
| either spend a lot of effort building custom developer tools, or
| repurpose the compiler as a server for multiple clients. Both
| approaches have their tradeoffs: the first, as the author
| mentions, violates DRY [1]. The second violates the Unix
| philosophy [2].
|
| However, there is a _third way_. Both developer tools and
| compilers can be seen as special cases of a much simpler and more
| general pattern known as a graph database [3, 4, 5].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
|
| [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxyyJyB_Ssc
|
| [4]: https://petevilter.me/post/datalog-typechecking/
|
| [5]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.03082.pdf
| matsemann wrote:
| Most of this post is just speculation like " _I seriously doubt
| it will work well in an average cafe though_ " without much
| substance. Either test it or report on it, or at least discuss
| its shortcomings based on some technical merits. And frankly I
| don't care how well it works on "spotty cafe wifi". If the wifi
| sucks I wouldn't sit there and work anyway.
|
| As for the language server protocol, nothing stops IDEA from
| doing the same. But while technically cool, it really doesn't
| matter as long as my programming language of choice works. I
| don't care _how_ it works. In my anecdotal example, the community
| made Elm plugin for IDEA was even for a long time miles ahead of
| the one for VSC.
| superdimwit wrote:
| Exactly, and I don't see how it would work any less well in a
| to cafe than VScode remote SSH.
| charrondev wrote:
| One of the things that baffles me is the rust-Lang support.
|
| Rust-lang has an official dual-licensed MIT/Apache language
| server protocol implementation (RLS) under active development.
| In my view it's currently a better experience than the custom
| IntelliJ one.
|
| Instead of collaborating though I see IntelliJ continuing on
| the path of their custom implementation. Every week RLS gives
| an update on their progress and so does IntelliJ on their rust
| plugin, but it just seems like so much duplicates effort.
| specialp wrote:
| Besides Typescript, I haven't seen any language server do
| better in syntax completion and introspection better than the
| JetBrains equivalent. They probably don't want to work on it
| because 1. If they write their own they can make it work to
| exactly what they need, and 2. They would probably not
| leverage as much working on the OSS version as they'd lose by
| open sourcing and doing the bulk of the work on what makes
| them money. That might sound cold but it is not unreasonable.
| surajrmal wrote:
| There is nothing inherently wrong with solving a problem
| multiple ways. While it's usually good for smaller players in
| a space to work together, I'm always happy to see others that
| trod their own path. They can make different
| choices/tradeoffs, and learn from each other. This usually
| leads to better outcomes for both of their user bases.
| dagmx wrote:
| I use both VSC and CLion, and CLion is a much better
| experience for Rust IMHO. I know the IntrlliJ only plugin is
| kind of lacking versus the CLion feature with regards to
| debugging, but overall I find CLions support to be miles
| ahead of rust analyzer for stability, speed and ease of use.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| Do you mean rust-analyzer's good experience and progress
| updates? RLS is in maintenance mode and deprecated in favor
| of rust-analyzer.
| skohan wrote:
| So will rust-analyzer also replace rustc eventually as the
| main rust compiler? Seems like a lot of overhead to keep
| two compiler versions at parity.
| dralley wrote:
| No, the goals of an IDE-oriented compiler are largely
| different from the goals of a bulk code compiler. They
| can / will share substantial amounts of code though.
| Quoting a developer:
|
| >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
|
| Aleksey Kladov: The limitations here are not specific to
| the Rust language, but a general for command line vs IDE
| compiler.
|
| The main thing is that the command line (or batch)
| compiler is primarily optimized for throughput (compiling
| N thousands lines of code per second), while an IDE
| compiler is optimized for latency (showing correct
| completion variants in M milliseconds after user typed
| new fragment of code). As usual with throughput vs
| latency, these two goals require pretty different
| optimizations (and even high-level architectures). In
| general, it's hard to retrofit low latency requirement on
| a compiler which was developed solely with big throughput
| in mind.
|
| Another thing is difference in handling invalid code. A
| traditional compiler front-end is usually organized as a
| progression of phases, where each phase takes an
| unstructured input, checks the input for validity, and,
| if it is indeed valid, adds more structure on top.
| Specifically, an error in an early phase (like parsing)
| usually means that the latter phase (like type checking)
| is not run for this bit of code at all. In other words,
| "correct code" is a happy case, and everything else can
| be treated as an error condition. In contrast, in IDE
| code is always broken, because the user constantly
| modifies it. As soon as the code is valid, the job of IDE
| ends and the job of the batch compiler begins. So, an
| IDE-oriented compiler should accommodate an incomplete
| and broken code, and provide IDE features, like
| completion, for such code.
| CryZe wrote:
| rust-analyzer is not a compiler. They plan on sharing a
| lot of code though.
| pirocks wrote:
| A few years ago I contributed to an Intellij plugin with
| significantly less resources than the rust one. What became
| clear there was that external tools are glitchy, laggy,
| frequently crash, and don't quite match Intellij's model of
| things, native Intellij support will likely always be better.
| sgeisler wrote:
| > Instead of collaborating though I see IntelliJ continuing
| on the path of their custom implementation.
|
| I haven't checked in a while, but RLS was sub-par for a long
| time (feature- and latencywise). Tight integration has its
| benefits if you can afford it (and apparently they can). So I
| guess as soon as they can get the same properties from RLS as
| from their own implementation they'd switch. But if it meant
| having to rewrite a lot of stuff that suddenly also becomes
| available to competitors that seems like a dumb move.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| JetBrains have always developed their own language analyzers
| from what I've seen. I would bet they have a clear API
| between a language analyzer and their suite of refactoring
| and code navigation tools, and it would probably end up being
| similar to work to support that API through an open source
| variant VS building their own.
|
| Not to mention, JetBrains typically are at the forefront of
| IDE support for a language, they start working on it before
| there are any open source tools around to base work off of.
| Even with mature languages like C#, the JetBrains C# language
| backend predates Rosslyn by a good decade I think.
| matsemann wrote:
| I can think of multiple reasons they may prefer doing it
| themselves: Differentiation, if they just reuse the same
| thing everyone else does, they will have no moat or extra
| features. Or maybe because the language server protocol
| cannot handle everything IDEA normally provides, so they will
| have to run some kind of parser etc. on their end anyway. Or
| that interfacing with an external tool can be buggy or have
| weird boundaries making certain features harder to implement.
| [deleted]
| dgellow wrote:
| > And frankly I don't care how well it works on "spotty cafe
| wifi". If the wifi sucks I wouldn't sit there and work anyway.
|
| Obviously the author cares about it. It's basically an article
| from a personal blog, what makes you think that the author
| should write for your own use instead of theirs?
|
| They are sharing their thoughts on the topic, and that's it.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| > Most of this post is just speculation like "I seriously doubt
| it will work well in an average cafe though"
|
| Meh. I don't think that's his main point. The two advantages of
| vscode he points out are:
|
| - browsers, and by extension Electron, are the best funded
| cross-platform GUI
|
| - vscode offloads language support to compilers (or other
| third-party tools) via LSP (Language Server Protocol)
|
| Electron apps are... slow craps. But it seems to be a problem
| of implementation, as vscode is slick and fast. In my own
| anecdotic experience, faster than IDEA.
|
| As for LSP, you don't care how it works, since it works _now_.
| But will it support as many languages as vscode in the future?
|
| Sure, that's speculation, but he gives a sound argument: it
| offloads the burden of maintaining the language integration to
| the community at large (or even to the language team itself).
| By creating a LSP server, you add support for vscode, vim,
| emacs, or even... Intellij. Hard to pass.
|
| LSP support on Intellij is a community plugin, far from first-
| class experience. And if it does become first-class, why then
| would people choose it over vscode? If both are LSP based,
| vscode is faster, free, and extensible in the most widely used
| language.
|
| And here's something less speculative, editor usage from
| stackoverflow surveys:
|
| - 2017[0] -> vscode 24.0% intellij 23%
|
| - 2018[1] -> vscode 34.9% intellij 24.9%
|
| - 2019[2] -> vscode 50.7% intellij 25.4%
|
| Disclaimer: I don't think LSP is great, yet. Most of the
| servers are still rough around the edges, but as an emacs user,
| I have big hopes for them.
|
| [0]
| https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-_-...
|
| [1]
| https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#development-e...
|
| [2]
| https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-e...
| arcturus17 wrote:
| It's important to note that IntelliJ is not Jetbrains' only
| product. PyCharm has seen a very significant growth during
| this period too (7.7% -> 13.4%), although PHPStorm has
| decreased (11.6% -> 7.6%).
|
| Regardless, I find it remarkable that IntelliJ hasn't lost an
| inch of ground (it's even made modest gains) despite VSCode's
| explosion.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| And you also have to see that they're just special purpuse
| branded IntelliJs that you can buy for less money.
|
| We have had licenses for WebStorm, PyCharm and IntelliJ
| Ultimate depending on what the Dev in question was doing in
| his job. So some of that market share/use is hidden.
| matsemann wrote:
| Why is it an advantage being Electron? If anything, IDEA is
| also cross-platform. As for speed, VSC is faster as a text
| editor, but not that much faster for IDE stuff if you try to
| use it as that. Even slower some times, maybe LSP incurs some
| overhead IntelliJ don't have to do.
|
| While I get the point of LSP, as I wrote in another comment
| an IDE is much more than understanding the AST of the
| language and providing autocomplete.
|
| I don't get your point about usage. What is it supposed to
| show? Even though VsCode is growing fast, JetBrains products
| are also growing and thus has a merit to them?
| Justsignedup wrote:
| This started with eclipse vs intellij. Eclipse was free and okay.
| Intellij was paid and polished to hell.
|
| Then vscode came along. Again it's great but not polished.
| Mishmash of plug-ins that may be supported and may do what you
| want.
|
| To be fair. Intellij needs to refactor their ui. It is not great.
| By default ugly. And material ui is not officially supported and
| buggy.
|
| The reality is yes they go for corporate because idk why but
| developers refuse to pay for an ide license. By hell developers
| earn a ton thry could afford one.
| Shadonototro wrote:
| VSCode won't kill IDEA, but it is a huge warning for Jetbrains
|
| They better invest A LOT MORE into solving slow startup and
| performance issues that are plaguing their IDEs since the
| beginning
|
| Time to ditch Java on the desktop, or invest in a native AOT
| compiler / or use GraalVM
| ex3ndr wrote:
| Java is not slow, even JS is not slow. 10% performance
| improvement doesn't make sense for rewrite.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| > slow startup
|
| Curious how often you start your IDE? For me it's at most once
| every few days.
|
| But then, I use Eclipse which has amazing multi-project support
| so there is nearly never a need to restart to switch contexts -
| its just choosing a different working set ...
| inshadows wrote:
| Hot buzz without much substance. You propose hipster driven
| development. Ignore lessons from the past and repeat all
| mistakes and deficiencies in super shiny alphabet soup of
| technology. Look at node.js ecosystem to see where this leads
| to.
|
| IDEA is fast once it starts up. It's not supposed to be used as
| Notepad (or Vim).
| brandonmenc wrote:
| I have been using JetBrains IDEs for about a decade, after
| having used emacs for nearly two decades. I have never felt
| that JetBrains was slow, but I hear that a lot here.
|
| I'm curious what situations people are finding JetBrains' speed
| to be impacting usability.
| santamarias wrote:
| Using Windows, comparing different Jetbrains products to VS
| Code, I personally experience for example a constant input
| lag in the terminal (Powershell) emulator (?) on Jetbrains
| IDEs.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| 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?
| jvolkman wrote:
| One reason is to be able to full screen the IDE and use
| its built-in windowing/paneling for editing and terminal.
| eralps wrote:
| Sometimes I just want to read code with highlighting. I want
| to open the project and search for some text in all the
| files. I don't want to wait for IntelliJ to take 30 seconds
| to open.
| jvolkman wrote:
| They've had something like that for a year.
| https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2020/04/lightedit-mode/
| _underfl0w_ wrote:
| You could use grep with vim or nano for quick searches and
| viewing without even leaving your terminal. Why bother with
| a GUI at all for that use case?
| sidsidev wrote:
| The delineation between those and VSCode seems unclear.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| VS Code is fantastic and I'd rather use it over something like
| Eclipse, but as a very happy jetbrains recurring subscriber, when
| my subscription comes up for renewal I can't think of anything
| that gives me so much productivity for such a relative pittance
| of cash.
|
| I still had it installed for quick edits until I found out about
| Panic's Nova and then uninstalled it and paid for that - the look
| and feel, and responsiveness of a native application just can't
| be beat.
| emrah wrote:
| Unfortunately, for a "light-weight" text editor, VS Code is very
| power hungry, especially if you have more than a few plugins. Yes
| IDEA is not much better but you get far more for your watts.
| barrenko wrote:
| VS Code is dead ugly.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I personally don't mind it. I probably would have taken issue
| with it if there were no user themes, but the ability to dress
| it up in my favorite Nord colors has assuaged my concerns.
| st3fan wrote:
| That is pretty subjective. Other people would call the
| Jetbrains products dead ugly and non-standard :-)
| meddlepal wrote:
| I don't really see IntelliJ and VSCode as competitors. VSCode
| competes with atom and other full-featured text editors (vim,
| emacs) ... its got great adoption amongst the newer generation of
| programmers that think those editors are old school and user
| hostile.
|
| VSCodes Java, Python, and Golang support is miles behind
| IntelliJ.
|
| FWIW, on my team at Microsoft where we write a lot of Go, theres
| a 50/50 split between IntelliJ/GoLand devs and VS Code devs and
| more people have switched to IntelliJ from VS Code than vice
| versa.
| runarberg wrote:
| Interestingly, as an emacs user, I am really rooting for the
| success of VSCode. The existence of the Language Server
| Protocol means that I have a horse in this race. Emacs users
| that use the same language server as VSCode users directly
| benefit from this relationship. So even though VSCode is
| competing with Emacs for market share, it is very much
| collaborating with Emacs (and other text editors that use LSP)
| in making language features comprehensive for everybody.
| reidrac wrote:
| I feel the same. I couldn't do Scala with vim if it wasn't
| for LSP and Metals.
|
| (and I'm aware that I still have less features than if I was
| using a full featured IDE, but I'm still very productive and
| also happy)
| loosetypes wrote:
| Any resources you could recommend for getting started re LSP
| with emacs?
| runarberg wrote:
| I personally started with lsp-mode[1] and just went from
| there.
|
| 1: https://emacs-lsp.github.io/lsp-mode/
| kvakva wrote:
| At this point, I don't think VSCode competes with Atom.
| xref wrote:
| As in VSCode never got to parity, or vice versa?
| baby wrote:
| Who use atom anymore?
| naavis wrote:
| In the past five years or so I haven't bumped into anyone
| who would use Atom. When Atom came out, it picked up some
| steam, but I'd say VS Code has already won that race by
| far.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| I haven't tried the Java integration but based on using VSCode
| for TypeScript I could imagine feature parity. VSCode is so
| good that it makes me concerned Microsoft is just using it to
| eat at JetBrains until they up and start charging for it in the
| future. Not sure how else to see it.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| I feel like we are kind of ignoring how Visual Studio plays
| into this, do we really expect Microsoft to replace it with
| VS Code? I feel like Visual Studio Pro/Ent is more of a
| competition with other paid IDEs and VS Code won't be,
| perhaps somewhat so it isn't positioned to eat Visual Studio?
| whynotminot wrote:
| So VSCode is very, very good for TypeScript. Hell, I'm pretty
| sure VSCode itself is written in TypeScript!
|
| But that does not carry over to all languages. When working
| on web apps with a Java backend, I still prefer Idea because
| it's better for Java and close enough for TypeScript so it
| comes out ahead over all.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| > But that does not carry over to all languages.
|
| It does. All languages are basically the same. They parse
| to ASTs that you can manipulate programmatically. If those
| ASTs are strongly typed, you can safely perform refractors.
| What makes IntelliJ good is the base framework JetBrains
| uses, the same one they use in WebStorm, PyCharm, etc.
| VSCode is that same thing: an adaptable base and I'm sure
| making it on par for Java if it isn't already will happened
| is only a matter of time if they invest.
| whynotminot wrote:
| > All languages are basically the same.
|
| Well that settles that, then.
|
| Thanks for playing folks wrap up the site! We're done
| here.
| happymellon wrote:
| Could not be further from the truth. Even with rope
| installed, VSCode won't always allow me to rename a
| variable and just silently fails.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| No. Microsoft has delegated Java support to redhat.
|
| ...no surprise, why would they waste their time on it?
| They give zero fruitcakes about Java.
|
| Let's just say, 3rd party plugins (like the redhat Java
| language support) are.... not of the same quality... as
| the Microsoft plugins.
| newlisper wrote:
| Actually, Microsoft cares a lot about Java and they
| invest resources on it. Why? azure
|
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/java/
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| It's possible they lack vision and focus for this thing,
| such that they go out and do "Java support" without
| making it good or caring about it.
|
| On the other hand, we're talking about Microsoft. If you
| lived in the 90s, I find it hard to imagine how you can
| see Microsoft in any other light. I know: different
| times, different leadership. But still: it seems possible
| that they've got a huge vision for this and want to do
| the equivalent of Internet Explorer 1 and 2 just to be
| out in the market, so they can come back and do versions
| 3 and 4 as their position has become entrenched.
| Delmania wrote:
| I think it's less that and more that Microsoft is
| leveraging Redhat's focus on Java. They have built a good
| editor and plug-in environment, then engage organizations
| stronger in other tech and have them build support.
| matsemann wrote:
| The language server is a really small part of an IDE,
| though. IDEA has soo many Java specific features I use
| every day (like maven, spring and other tools, debugger,
| hot reloading, profiling etc), and other non-language
| specific stuff like db viewer.
| uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh wrote:
| Eventually LSP will be totally solved.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Absolutely not, there are many, many language-specific
| things that an IDE does beyond code hints.
|
| Microsoft doesn't seem to be investing that much, if
| anything, on languages other than JS/TS; it is delegating
| all on the OSS community through plugins. And while some
| of the plugins are really good, in my experience they
| don't even come close to the native capabilities of
| Jetbrains products.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| This is what Microsoft does. Their #1 thing is being in
| the market even if the product is bad. They're delegating
| now, but wait until they've established their foothold,
| leveled up the core framework. Then they're going to stop
| delegating one language after another.
| sidsidev wrote:
| Sure, but Microsoft also has Visual Studio. If they start
| heavily investing in VSCode for C#, C++, then they're
| going to be cannibalising Visual Studio. And for what?
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Embrace: put out an open source code editor.
|
| Extend: have a plugin system that everyone can contribute
| to (sounds like eclipse or IntelliJ CE) and even make
| money off of. Plugins don't have to be free.
|
| Extinguish: make your own plugins with full refactoring
| support etc. for the languages you see most actively used
| (everyone uses it for Go and Python now? Make a good
| enough plugin for that. Nobody uses it for Erlang anyway?
| Leave it to the community)
|
| The good old MS in action.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| It remains to be seen whether they will find this
| economical when they are not making any direct revenue on
| the product.
|
| I understand that VSCode is part of a grand strategic
| plan that goes beyond revenue, but I seriously doubt that
| they'd be willing to internally maintain the absolute
| truckload of code that would ensue from getting to
| feature parity with Jetbrains on languages like Java or
| Python. I'd wager at some point the quality would derail,
| or someone would pull the plug altogether on such a cost
| sink.
|
| And that's one of the things I love about Jetbrains
| products. I'm actually delighted to pay for a product
| that I use every day for ~8 hours and which I think is
| extremely well-designed, knowing that the money is going
| to a company of craftsmen who do that, and only that.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| A short read and should give enough examples and
| descriptions of the strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
|
| Once you've killed off the competition, a lot of other
| things don't really matter much any more. From the money
| perspective, it's a well known strategy to loose money to
| kill off the competition. It's just about who has the
| deeper pockets/better stomach for it. Microsoft has
| traditionally been able to do it and I have no doubts
| that they would still have the stomach for it. I don't
| know if their pockets are still as deep as they used to
| be. Windows (and Office etc.) used to be so dominant and
| such a cash cow that it enabled a lot of the other
| strategies, but then again they also had to get Windows
| to that point first. The landscape looks a bit different
| nowadays I'd wager, given Apple's and Google's footholds
| on mobile but then again, I wasn't really old enough back
| in the day, to really compare from my own experience,
| what the landscape looked like back then with Apple,
| Amiga, Atari, SGI, Sun etc. in the mix.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| > A short read and should give enough examples and
| descriptions of the strategy
|
| I know about it and don't need a Wikipedia link to
| enlighten me, thank you.
|
| In my comment I questioned your application of that
| theory to reality by raising concerns about the
| cost/benefit analysis from a Microsoft perspective.
|
| I don't think you're accurately scoping the undertaking
| of getting VSCode to feature-parity with Jetbrains
| products in Java, Python, etc., nor the potential benefit
| for Microsoft. My contention is that the gap between
| Jetbrains and VSCode outside of JavaScript/TypeScript is
| massive, and that while VSCode is strategically important
| to Microsoft, they don't have the incentives to even try
| to extinguish Jetbrains.
|
| But instead of addressing any of the concerns in my
| original comment, you've just pretty much gone on your
| own unrelated tirade.
|
| Also, Microsoft ultimately lost the browser wars and many
| of the similar crusades that they undertook in the 90s
| and early 2000s, so maybe they've learned a few things
| along the ways.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Wow, I seriously underestimated the way this written
| communication could be misunderstood. Especially how
| anyone could possibly read it as a 'tirade'. And not
| everyone knows about EEE, especially nowadays but fair
| enough as to how a link to explain some of it might upset
| someone that does. That said I really thought that you
| weren't aware of some of what they had done and how much
| it would have cost them.
|
| We have a difference in opinion it seems on how much
| money we think Microsoft might be willing to pay for it
| and other items as well. That's fair enough. How any of
| that is a tirade is honestly quite nebulous to me but I
| probably won't be able to change your mind, even if I
| tell you that it wasn't written by the furiously typing
| mad dog you probably imagined.
|
| Let's structure it, so you see how I thought I was
| addressing things:
|
| > truckload of code
|
| I.e. costs a lot of money: "it's a well known strategy to
| loose money to kill off the competition"
|
| > pull the plug altogether on such a cost sink
|
| Addressed in "Microsoft has traditionally been able to do
| it and I have no doubts that they would still have the
| stomach for it"
|
| > feature parity with Jetbrains on languages like Java or
| Python
|
| The rest that starts with "I don't know if their pockets
| are still as deep as they used to be." and which also
| includes "The landscape looks a bit different nowadays
| I'd wager" is basically me acknowledging that your
| opinion is different on this than mine and that I can see
| that potentially their cost/benefit analysis would lean
| towards your interpretation. They are trying to cover the
| Java side well enough with the Redhat maintained plugin.
| If Redhat does a good enough job to take customers away
| from Jetbrains that plays into Microsoft's strategy
| without spending a lot of cash on it. Brilliant.
|
| It's an evolving thing too and as you point out in your
| reply here, MS did loose the browser wars eventually. The
| market changes all the time through technology
| breakthroughs for example and people are actively working
| against EEE tactics too. I for one am glad that MS lost
| the browser wars and to address one thing that I did not
| comment on (on purpose because I was concerned with the
| EEE discussion and not whether or not one or both of us
| like JetBrains):
|
| > I'm actually delighted to pay for a product that I use
| every day for ~8 hours
|
| I absolutely agree that IntelliJ is awesome and I don't
| want to miss it or use anything else. I don't even use
| vscode for FE code, unlike most of our FE developers. I'm
| traditionally a BE guy but have no qualms about doing FE
| work as long as you don't make me do pixel perfect
| reproductions of designs in CSS :)
| sidsidev wrote:
| You're missing that the product makes no money. Thinking
| in terms of killing off competition is pointless when
| you're not referring to the strategy.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Good point. I don't think that necessarily matters too
| much though. You obviously can't just give everything
| away and not have a strategy to make money at all.
|
| That said, giving something away can still make you money
| or ensure that your competition does not make money
| either. This comes down to being a large enough entity to
| support that strategy, which I personally think Microsoft
| still is.
|
| If I'm Microsoft, I can give away a "base IDE", enlist
| volunteers and other companies that can even make a buck
| themselves for quite some time (and spend some money
| myself) to kill two birds with one stone.
|
| 1) I can bind developers to my platform. From the 2019
| annual shareholders report: "Beyond GitHub, we are
| investing to build the most complete toolchain for
| developers -- independent of language, framework, or
| cloud. Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code are now the
| most popular code-editing tools in the world. And
| TypeScript is one of the fastest-growing programming
| languages."
|
| 2) Where I deem necessary use it to kill off competition
| by driving them out of business. For quite a few
| companies, the price point of the IDE that their
| developers use is important i.e. the choice that
| companies give their employee is: Use vscode or IntelliJ
| Community Edition (or something else that's free but
| we're not paying) and it's very hard to explain developer
| productivity increases to the bean counters.
| spullara wrote:
| If you ever get a chance to work on something with
| JetBrains developers (I got to when I was on the Java 8
| JSR), you will find them to be some of the best out
| there. Their Java support was always ahead of javac for
| the new features we were specifying.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| I think VSCode is really good, but even when I was only
| writing JS I ended up preferring WebStorm. I like its
| refactoring tools and command palette better, and I also
| prefer its "batteries-included" rather than "plugin-first"
| approach (although I do have a few plugins on JetBrains
| products always, such as Vim, there are significantly fewer
| than in VSCode)
|
| Anecdotally, I know other devs in the same situation. You
| wouldn't pry WebStorm from their cold dead hands, even with
| an excellent free offering like VSCode. But I also know some
| who don't understand why you would pay for WebStorm when
| VSCode is free, which is reasonable (though if they took WS
| for a spin, they might change their minds).
|
| Now that I write mostly Python and JS there is no contest at
| all. I get all the JS/TS goodies, plus absolutely amazing
| Python features.
|
| Like GP is saying, I don't think JetBrains and VSCode even
| compete that much. Maybe VSCode will capture a good part of
| the JS world - which is huge of course - but I think WebStorm
| will maintain a decent foothold there no matter what, and I
| think JetBrains will remain very strong in other languages.
| matwood wrote:
| Interesting. I have used IntelliJ for Java for as long as I can
| remember and can't imagine using anything else. For JS and Go I
| use VSCode. I wonder if it's just what I started with and am
| used to. I've tried to use Intellij a couple of times for Go,
| but end up back on VSCode.
| meddlepal wrote:
| I dont know how you're productive with VS Code and Go... I
| watch my coworkers live code with it sometimes and they are
| struggling. The lang server crashes constantly and stuff like
| autoimports or code complete barely works. I sometimes want
| to scream while watching them struggle.
| gotbeans wrote:
| Been using it daily for +1year and that doesn't sound like
| my experience at all.
| matwood wrote:
| I've read about those issues, and used to get them
| occasionally, but haven't really had them in a long time.
| Maybe my projects aren't large enough to cause any issues?
| patrickmcnamara wrote:
| I think only recently did the gopls become turned on by
| default for the Go plugin for VS Code. I've been using it
| for years and have never had any major issues.
| baby wrote:
| Really? Never had issues personally
| ex3ndr wrote:
| Same pretty much the same for JetBrains stuff. Constant
| screaming about how to configure their autoformatter
| compatible to prettifier for specific settings. Not
| supporting required configs out of the box. And build and
| IDE often live in completely different worlds. For example,
| project moodel at gradle and at IDEA is completely
| different and IDEA one is much more limited. And so on.
|
| Android Studio could hang whole mac while "indexing" and
| often need to "reset caches and restart" while works just
| fine in VS Code.
| jerf wrote:
| Be sure they're updating. There's no prompt or anything
| that I've seen in my environment to do so.
|
| It's still not perfect but my experience doesn't match
| that.
| st3fan wrote:
| The quality is really getting better but it is my
| experience that you still have to restart the language
| server (or the integration?) multiple times per hour on any
| non-trivial project. It is frustrating but it also becomes
| a habit to quickly reach out to that shortcut in case
| completion, formatting or intellisense randomly stops
| working.
|
| It is hard to complain about free tools though. For a Free
| tool, VSCode, gopls and the Go extensions are great.
|
| If you want more stability, polish and features, pay the
| $8/month for Goland?
| karmakaze wrote:
| I'm the same way. Java/Kotlin in IDEA, front-end (js/ts/css)
| in VSCode, and Go can be either but usually VSCode. I don't
| really want/need more than what VSCode provides for it.
|
| For Ruby, I'm lost without RubyMine--I work on a huge
| codebase and lean on the superfast search (with default
| "*.rb, !*test*" files) a lot, usually restricted to a project
| subfolder.
|
| I'm really glad they renamed Gogland to GoLand--gland is
| weird (unless maybe I'm doing Monads in Haskell or
| something).
| SnowingXIV wrote:
| I work on a large rails codebase as well but within a
| docker container doing emulation because ARM. How does
| RubyMine perform then? Last time I tried it felt sluggish.
| Nursie wrote:
| Goland is great if you have IntelliJ muscle memory, I haven't
| tried using IntelliJ directly for Go though, Imagine it's
| probably sub-optimal.
|
| You do have to pay for Goland also.
| denysvitali wrote:
| I love Goland, and it's honestly one of the products that I
| very much like to pay for. You can eventually pay a one
| time fee and use it forever (without updates).
|
| I'm also using it for Rust, but it's missing CLion's
| powerful debugger UI - but I think that gdb is good enough
| :-)
| d3nj4l wrote:
| That's how every JetBrains IDE subscription works,
| though. If you pay for a year, you get the version at the
| start of that year for perpetuity.
| parhamn wrote:
| If you have IntelliJ ultimate, Goland is installable via
| the Go plugin for free. I use IntelliJ for go/js/python
| using their plugins and they work as well as the native
| apps (pycharm, webstorm, goland). Although it is a bit
| tougher to configure because you treat things more as
| modules.
| nkozyra wrote:
| I would (and do) use goland directly, but i think intellij
| handles the basics. I only use intellij for rust, and it
| does well enough there as well
| mwint wrote:
| I'm a current MS intern, curious what work ya'll are doing in
| Go. Would you be up for a call sometime?
| meddlepal wrote:
| Email me your MS alias and I'll reach out over Teams on
| Monday. Email is my profile.
| mwint wrote:
| Thank you. I might be missing something, but not seeing an
| email in your profile here and not seeing anything
| plausible in internal search.
|
| I'm t-perway@, I don't mind that being public for a bit to
| avoid playing tag :)
| Stratoscope wrote:
| The email field in an HN profile is private. You have to
| add it to the About field if you want others to see it.
| gh123man wrote:
| Ex MS employee (and former intern). Somewhat new to Go (and
| using VSCode full time) - but it's the language of choice for
| my job right now. Go seems to be popular in backend apps (non
| windows mostly) where concurrency and performance are
| important. The tooling around go for performance profiling
| and optimization are rather good IMO, and quite friendly if
| you are accustomed to Unix style CLI tools.
|
| I do agree with the other comments that the language server
| is buggy but it works quite well when it works. I may be a
| bit bias when dealing with tooling since I came from Xcode
| where workflow breaking bugs was the norm.
| baby wrote:
| On my team that works on Rust I think there's a similar split
| between Clion and vscode. I prefer vscode fwiw
| quercusa wrote:
| I think the textbook (i.e., _The Innovator 's Dilemma_) model
| for a disruptive technology is specifically one that starts out
| looking like it only competes in a different (typically lower-
| value) market, right until it's eating your lunch.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| I agree. They are not competition at all.
|
| I used to work together with someone who didn't catch basic
| errors in VueJs and Symfony projects in VSCode because (idk)
| somehow it can't do it or some plugin is missing.
|
| On the other side there's me with PHPStorm and WebStorm with
| full project inspection support and detailed analysis about
| code available at a glance.
|
| Maybe I just don't know how to do that in VSCode but VSCode
| does not feel like an IDE but rather a Notepad++ on steroids to
| me. Sure, you can do the job in it but that's not the reason I
| pay a lot of money to JetBrains each year.
|
| Edit: typo
| dschuessler wrote:
| It's likely a missing plugin. As an avid VSCode user I would
| liken the difference of VSCode and IntelliJ IDEs with the
| difference between an unfurnished apartment and a fully
| furnished apartment.
|
| With the latter you skip setting up your environment and just
| start doing your thing. The former is more barebones in this
| regard. It lets you build your own IDE from plugins and a ton
| of configuration options.
|
| As someone who likes to have one app for everything code
| related (from Markdown to the programming languages I use, to
| config files and to LaTeX) I like to "bring my own furniture"
| for the unique combination of needs I have.
|
| Thus it makes perfect sense to me that VSCode is regularly
| underestimated regarding its IDE capabilities. Stock VSCode
| is indeed just "Notepad++ on steroids". You have to invest
| some time to build it up into a fully fledged IDE.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I'll just keep using Eclipse over here in the corner :-)
|
| I guess its a case of sunk investment, but having got to the
| point of understanding top to bottom how Eclipse works I find
| that it still beats everything else in terms of presenting me
| with a completely comprehensive framework for developing at a
| high level of complexity across multiple languages and
| environments. Every time I move to another tool I find them
| better on the surface but missing these deeper features that
| enable dealing with super complex infrastructure across many
| projects in many languages.
| namelosw wrote:
| The link seems to be dead but here's my thought anyway.
|
| People in this thread mentioned brilliant factors among those
| IDE/editors, but the 2 cents I want to add is their difference is
| related to the way they work, or how people work on them.
|
| VSCode: LSP reflects the mentality of VSCode - it's extensible,
| it's working but it usually doesn't offer first-class
| experiences. It usually aims to serve the intersection or the
| common part of languages first, then the specific language.
|
| The idea is very akin to Emacs, in which the community tries to
| find the abstraction of functionality, and then people can work
| on different implementations at the same time - there's Helm for
| completion, and Flycheck for checking in the first place, then
| there's a whole bunch of implementations. The good is it solves
| the m*n problem, but the bad is the experience is not good as
| tailored for specific languages. Actually, one specific struggle
| in the Emacs community right now is choosing between LSP and
| language-specific plugins.
|
| Intellij: It is on the other side of the spectrum. It's polished,
| feels pragmatic for major languages they're targeting. Unlike LSP
| and VSCode, It was aimed to be the best Java IDE, and it did it.
| Now you can see the inheritance panel for a lot of languages that
| don't even really care about inheritance.
|
| So IMO it's like Conway's law. The key difference between VSCode
| and Intellij is because of the way they work - VSCode was built
| on community, and Microsoft is more like a facilitator. While
| IntelliJ is driven by a single company, and the plugins and
| communities are supplement features.
| coldtea wrote:
| The examples the author uses to make the case that Idea is
| getting "fatter" and "more corporate" are actually things VS Code
| has too:
|
| "What bothers me about JetBrains is the fact that they seem to be
| playing along. Judging by the talks on their recent conference,
| IDEA goes more elephantine, more corporate, more complex. (...)
| In this regard I will mention two announcements: the CodeWithMe
| technology and a lightweight "IDEA viewer" product. CodeWithMe
| allows one IDEA instance to run another instance remotely to
| allow for collaborative work. Even the color scheme and the
| shortcuts are provided by the master instance, if I understood
| that correctly. That is very Java and very corporate, no doubt.
| The IDEA viewer is another step in the same direction: let the
| IDE run somewhere else, maybe on a server, and let people use a
| lightweight client "on a laptop in a cafe". I seriously doubt it
| will work well in an average cafe though. Their WiFi tends to be
| unreliable. Given this degree of dependence of the client
| machine, spotty WiFi will cause a developer to smash his laptop
| against the coffee machine."
|
| Talk about underming your own case.
|
| CodeWithMe is what VS Code calls "Live Share" and "IDEA viewer"
| is what VS Code calls "Visual Studio Code Remote Development"
| (the SSH part), and has been available since forever in Emacs
| too.
| maxrev17 wrote:
| I can't find an equivalent of remote development on any of the
| JetBrains IDEs - please could you provide a link?
| coldtea wrote:
| I don't think it's in it yet. Those are 2 features the author
| says IntelliJ announced (for the future). Although the first
| (Code With Me) is already available.
| melling wrote:
| I think JetBrains is much better than VScode for development.
|
| However, for me VScode is always open, and I frequently open
| files with VScode from the terminal code
| filename
| charrondev wrote:
| I know you can do similarly with the IntelliJ apps. For me I
| can also do `pstorm filename` and open in PHPStorm.
|
| Of course for single one off files I prefer to open in sublime
| because of how much faster it is.
| finiteseries wrote:
| I've actually happily reinstalled Sublime Text after almost a
| decade due to this.
|
| VS code has been relegated to a text editor with my work
| changing from mostly JS to mostly C++, and `code X` or
| opening up a JSON file is _just_ slow enough for a little
| internal groan to come out.
|
| Certainly not XCode levels of groan, but slow enough to move
| me anyways.
| slifin wrote:
| This is the same for me, Sublime 4 is faster and more
| polished than VSCode and Intellji is more feature packed
|
| Personally I switch between Sublime Text 4 and Intellji
| depending on the task, VSCode in my opinion isn't outstanding
| in either performance, polish or features
|
| Maybe Emac 28's speed increase will change the landscape a
| bit
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I have no doubt that IDEA is probably more "professional" but I
| find VS Code is more my preference because of the open source
| nature of it. I know it has it's warts but it's in a whole
| different league than IDEA products. However to each his own, I
| have made a living with open source and that has colored my
| perceptions of products.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| HN deserve better content than this, while the topic is
| interesting there are too much errors, unadjusted logical
| quantifiers and omissions to make this biased writing worth a
| read.
| kvakva wrote:
| HN deserve better comments than this.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Sure asking for better epistemological quality should be
| disincentivized.. Do you realize the distopy you imply?
| jart wrote:
| It's also posted by some anonymous throwaway account that was
| registered on GitHub three days ago. JetBrains deserves more
| respect than this. They're not threatened. They're a rising
| star. They're making tons of money when the rest of the
| industry thought there wasn't any money to be had in tools
| anymore. I love them because speaking as a long time Emacs
| user, JetBrains makes the only IDEs I've seen that simulates
| Emacs well enough that I can feel comfortable using it. Java is
| a real pleasure to work with thanks to them and I don't see
| that changing anytime soon. If they had support for make and
| assembler then I'd use it while working on cosmopolitan libc
| too.
| uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh wrote:
| This has me seeing maybe but probably not spending my gov-bux
| on webstorm
| st3fan wrote:
| > They're a rising star. They're making tons of money when
| the rest of the industry thought there wasn't any money to be
| had in tools anymore.
|
| I think this is key - WHO knew that you could build out a
| billion dollar business from developer tools.
| hashkb wrote:
| LSP is a huge deal and ought to allow all kinds of new editing
| tools to empower users with the kind of things we used to get
| scoffed at by Visual Studio users for living without. Vim is now
| as "full featured" as VSC and I have some bet winnings to
| collect.
|
| Edit: corrected autocorrect
| masklinn wrote:
| > the kind of things we used to get scoffed at by Visual Studio
| users for living without.
|
| Needing to buy thirdparty addons to get basic refactoring
| tools? Because for a very long time that was the VS experience,
| it was incredibly bare-bones compared to the equivalent Java
| IDEs.
| kvakva wrote:
| Curious about people who switched to something like Webstorm from
| VS Code. I've tried it for Typescript development and didnt find
| much of a difference. I can say webstorm has better , more clean
| ui for Git, but that's it. Certainly issue was that I could only
| try it shortly on simple project. Would love it here about some
| more example from other where to see the differences.
|
| Btw I am pretty impressed with Quick fix and autocomplete
| functionality for VS code. It's IMHO pretty great for text
| editor.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Right now I'm primarily using PyCharm, but I made the switch
| from VSCode to Webstorm a few years back. Here's what I liked
| better:
|
| - The refactoring keyboard shortcuts and facilities (moving
| functions from one file to another, UX for renaming, etc.)
|
| - I found code introspection and autocomplete to be more
| accurate
|
| - I perceived WebStorm to run better on my machine. The initial
| load time was longer, but after that the latency of different
| actions seemed better (again, this was just my perception, on
| my machine).
|
| - Preferred how many things came installed by default on WS vs
| having to install plugins on VSCode.
|
| - The Live Templates feature was better than the equivalent
| code snippets feature.
|
| - The command palette felt more intuitive, I could find things
| that occurred to me much easier than in VSCode's equivalent.
|
| - The git UX which you mention
|
| Those are a few things that come to mind. VSCode may have
| significantly improved in these dimensions over time - I
| wouldn't know because I only use for writing markdown and
| sometimes to compare my working code base with another code
| base in a second window.
| mr_tristan wrote:
| People act as if the language server protocol has no equivalent
| in JetBrains ecosystem. There are, things like MPS:
| https://www.jetbrains.com/help/mps/mps-user-s-guide.html, or the
| platform: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/docs/intellij/intellij-
| platfor...
|
| This whole argument that VS code takes over seems to be assuming
| the Language Server Protocol and Electron is a vastly superior
| ecosystem. I haven't seen any evidence of this being true. It's
| probably an improvement over the older Visual Studio ecosystem,
| though.
|
| Sure seems like this argument is just another version of, "Well,
| it's Java, so it's enterprise/corporate/boring".
|
| They're both open source ecosystems, and that's great. And I'd
| rather work with the JetBrains or VS Code ecosystems, then say,
| Eclipse, even though all of them are open source. (I haven't met
| many Android devs yearning for the Eclipse-based Android
| development environment.)
|
| Edit: to clarify that open source commment
| barkingcat wrote:
| Isn't eclipse also an open source ecosystem too? that said, I
| would rather work with either Jetbrains or VS code than
| eclipse.
| mr_tristan wrote:
| Yeah, I didn't mean to say that Eclipse "wasn't" open source,
| just that these other ecosystems are _also_. It 's not like
| you have a choice between "Eclipse and commercial".
| tomlu wrote:
| The language server protocol is diametrically opposite to the
| way that IntelliJ works. For each language, IntelliJ builds its
| own internal representation (PSI) of the source code. There are
| a lot of language specific things, but there are also a lot of
| commonalities between languages.
|
| I have no idea how you would morph (say) IntelliJ's Java
| support to use a LSP without basically throwing everything away
| and starting over.
|
| Caveat: I never worked at Jetbrains, but I did work for two
| years supporting Android Studio and IntelliJ at Google, which
| involved a lot of work in its internals.
| qyi wrote:
| I used IDEA once and it failed to parse or validate my Java code
| because it lacked the same understanding of generics as javac. So
| I would be developing my codebase with various red marks
| everywhere and no confidence in the code navigation tools such as
| "find all references". Seems IDEA is overrated to me. But I know
| webdevs have other use cases like automatic CI or whatever and
| not the slightest desire to be able to statically analyze code.
| To be fair I stopped using Java since then as I could not ever
| fully learn all the edge cases, and corners like generics edge
| cases and JMM have about 3 people in the world who actually talk
| about them.
|
| FWIW Eclipse and NetBeans also broke in other places in my code
| base too (all related to generics), so maybe just Java developers
| have no idea how those weird parts of the spec surrounding
| generics, type inference, and capture conversion work.
|
| I tried VS Code to analyze some Go code and it just downloaded a
| bunch of ghetto stuff from random people's githubs and ran their
| build scripts or whatever. It broke of course and I gave up as I
| was new to Go and didn't want to dig into "why thing here wants
| this version of this and that". Currently using 30 day trial of
| Goland, which at least works out of the box. This is after trying
| ctags and cscope after realizing they are basically glorified
| grep.
| malkia wrote:
| I'm having paralysis analysis with VS Code, and trying to choose
| which plugins to use now. Curation is key, when there tens, if
| not hundredths of thousands of stars for plugins seemingly doing
| the same thing.
|
| I have only one wish for JetBrains IDE - can we have one singular
| one with everything in it, not CLion for C++, and then Dart
| working on most, but Flutter only in some, or Java, or C#, etc.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| I see Jetbrains' role first as a curator of a near flawless
| collection of plugins for a given purpose.
|
| I'm not surprised the set of plugins is different for each use
| case. I don't need a Java IDE with CMake plugins, so I don't
| care if latest CMake plugin conflicts with the Maven plugin (as
| an example). I'm not _sure_ this is the motivation for per-
| language products, but I strongly suspect it is.
| ssijak wrote:
| For typed languages like Java and Kotlin there is really no
| competition. IntelliJ is just clearly above every other IDE. For
| dynamic languages advantages are less clear, but still there.
| Every time I tried to use VsCode for longer periods of time on my
| JS/TS projects, I would stumble on many small bugs and problems,
| usually with extensions that I would loose the nerve and just get
| back to Webstorm.
| skohan wrote:
| It shouldn't be surprising, right? Didn't Kotlin start as a
| JetBrains project?
| st3fan wrote:
| It did, and millions of Android developers use Android
| Studio, which is of course also part of the IntelliJ family.
| So I'm sure that and the (financial?) relationship with
| Google has also helped a crazy amount with making the whole
| platform better.
|
| I read somewhere that Jetbrains is valued a billion dollars
| these days. With zero investor funding. This is a very very
| serious business with smart leadership.
| spullara wrote:
| It is valued more than that, 2/3 of the founders are
| billionaires now. What I love about their story is they
| basically just made a great product that developers are
| willing to pay for and everyone else eventually died.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I've used both extensively, and for me it boils down to whether I
| am using Typescript or not, as the code hints for Typescript are
| much better in VS Code. I've also noticed VS Code suffers less
| performance degradation with some projects.
|
| In general, for Java and Python, Intellij is much more polished
| and functional.
| croes wrote:
| Comparing an IDE with an source code editor
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| > That situation may catch the IDEA family between a rock and a
| hard place: it has to outdo compilers
|
| CLion (the C/C++ variant of the JetBrains IDE family) introduced
| built-in support for the clangd language server in 2018. It's not
| perfect (https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues?q=clangd), but
| they improve the integration with every release. I leave it
| turned on by default now.
| k__ wrote:
| Funny that the LSP wanted to give IDEs a way to move fast, by
| getting its info directly from the compiler and then slow
| compiling languages like Rust built another tool (the analyzer)
| to make IDEs fast again.
|
| My switch away from WebStorm was with the rise of compile-to-js
| languages. I asked myself, do I get more from a new language than
| a fully fledged IDE with JS-only support? And I choose to go
| Sublime and then VSCode.
|
| In a fast moving industry there is simply no way I'm going to
| wait for an IDE vendor to implement everything I want to use.
| rcxdude wrote:
| > Funny that the LSP wanted to give IDEs a way to move fast, by
| getting its info directly from the compiler and then slow
| compiling languages like Rust built another tool (the analyzer)
| to make IDEs fast again.
|
| I don't think that was the main goal. The main goal was giving
| a standardised protocol for implementing language support in
| IDEs, so instead of needing n * m implementations for n IDEs
| and m languages, only m implementations are required. The idea
| that you could use the language's compiler to implement this
| was only a bonus (and it's not a very good one in practise: the
| requirements on parsing and analysing code as it's being edited
| are very different from when compiling. That's the core reason
| for rust-analyser taking over from RLS. Without the LSP concept
| you could just as well build the compiler as a library into
| whatever plugin architechture you had).
| malkia wrote:
| I think the question we should be asking (rather) is what wold
| happen to Visual Studio?
| david422 wrote:
| I found IntelliJ IDEA about 7 years ago. Before that, I had used
| a number of different editors/IDE's for polyglot development.
|
| I honestly really started to enjoy developing again. Intellij
| let's me focus on the problems I'm trying to solve. It does a ton
| to help remove the boilerplate of programming. The things that I
| really use it most for: - 1. quick fixes.
| Automatically adds imports and cleans up code with a key command
| - 2. reformatting. I just reflexively reformat everything as I go
| - 3. show parameters. Cmd P shows me what I need to call
| functions - 4. find usages. Jumping through code is so fast
| and easy - 5. syntax highlighting. So many options. But the
| ones I use most are showing issues as I type, and clicking on a
| variable and it highlights its usages
|
| There are probably more that I'm forgetting I use.
|
| But I also bought the pro license for myself and happily renew
| every year. A lot of the features and upgrades I don't even use -
| they are for languages that other people use. But I am happy to
| support the product and get features that I do use.
| iends wrote:
| I mostly write JavaScript/TypeScript (with a little Go in my
| freetime) and I switched from Webstorm to VSCode in December.
| Things I miss from Webstorm/Intellij:
|
| - Test runner
|
| - visual diff tool (gitlens isn't quite good enough)
|
| I've been thinking about what I'd miss from VSCode if I switched
| back and I cant' really come up with anything other than I really
| love https://shadesofpurple.pro/.
|
| So why did I switch? Basically everybody is using VSCode on
| screencasts, at work, etc. for TypeScript and JavaScript and I
| wanted to see what the fuss was about. It's not better, and I
| don't really understand why it's popularity.
| skohan wrote:
| > The key technology here is probably the Language Server
| Protocol
|
| I've been working on an LSP implementation lately, and I have to
| say so far the reality falls short of the promise. I feel like
| what LSP _should_ be is a clear, simple interface for
| implementing IDE-like features for any language, but my
| experience is that it is incredibly arcane and difficult to use.
|
| The main issue is the documentation. It has a high-level intro
| about what LSP is, which is basically marketing, and then it has
| some sort-of details about (maybe) all the interfaces supported
| by LSP. But I was sorely lacking that "middle" documentation
| about how to practically get set up and do things. I had to piece
| a lot of things together through blog posts, and reverse
| engineering mature LSP implementations like rust-analyzer. And
| the documentation you do have of the individual interfaces is
| kind of weird. Like LSP is a JSON-RPC protocol, but documentation
| of the objects involved is all C# code, which is never really
| explained. And many of the concepts, like what a 'code lens' is,
| what properties it has, and how it would appear in an editor are
| never explained, so you just have to look up VSCode documentation
| to figure out what any of this means.
|
| I feel like LSP is sold as a general framework for IDE-
| independence, but working with it feels a lot more like you've
| just given access to some of the internal API's in VSCode via
| JSON-RPC, and other editors have just adapted to this.
|
| LSP is a great concept, but I can imagine if you really
| approached this problem from scratch, you could probably reach a
| much better, more sensible result.
| Dayshine wrote:
| As someone who wrote an LSP implementing server 2 years ago
| (when the documentation was even less complete), I can't really
| relate to this.
|
| As far as I know, the LSP specification only accepts PRs once
| there is a reference implementation. So you can literally just
| run VS Code with verbose logging turned on for the reference
| language server and inspect the communications.
|
| I did my learning by literally following the VS Code guide (the
| reference implementation)
| https://code.visualstudio.com/api/language-extensions/progra...
| and implementing each feature one by one.
|
| You simply return an object following the interface and
| features magically work. It's wonderful. I added the "Outline"
| feature in VS Code, and the similar feature to show all symbols
| in a file in vim in about 2 hours.
|
| > And many of the concepts, like what a 'code lens' is, what
| properties it has, and how it would appear in an editor are
| never explained=
|
| Well, no, because they're not specified. How vim displays a
| code lens might be very different to how VS code does.
| skohan wrote:
| > As far as I know, the LSP specification only accepts PRs
| once there is a reference implementation. So you can
| literally just run VS Code with verbose logging turned on for
| the reference language server and inspect the communications.
|
| "You have to run VSCode to reach a working understanding"
| seems like a pretty far cry from the stated goal of the
| project of decoupling the language features from the code
| editor to me
| sidsidev wrote:
| Marketing-level docs and then fine-grained API docs sounds very
| MS.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| Mmm... Feels more like a loss leader than a technical disruption.
|
| Don't get more wrong; look at Teams, it clearly works to offer a
| low/zero cost inferior product that is integrated into existing
| products, so fair call.
|
| ...but all that technical stuff? Oh come on; the jetbrains
| products are better, at basically everything; the only reason
| more people dont use them is that you have to actually pay for
| them.
|
| Sure, vscode starts more quickly on a low end machine when you
| have no plugins installed, but the quality of plugins varies
| wildly and so does the memory use / speed of vscode when you have
| them installed.
|
| ...and the tools it offers for most languages is simply...
| _inferior_ ; there simply no other way to describe the support
| for Java, kotlin, go, rust, python, c#.
|
| So... you know, in some ways it does feel like a disruption going
| on, but not because of technical reasons; Microsoft is just
| playing the "we have lots of money" card.
| ex3ndr wrote:
| I pay subscription for everything but 99% of time use VS Code.
| Why? Remote execution for huge typescript project - i moved it
| to separate mac mini and performance (i can open 5 VS Code
| without slowing anything at all)
| Xorlev wrote:
| Speaking as a corporate programmer working from home
| indefinitely, I'd kill for IDEA Viewer. My laptop can't have code
| on it, so I'm forced to remote desktop to my workstation to use
| IntelliJ and CLion remotely, which is a middling experience at
| best. A light protocol for synchronizing the frontend with the
| IDE backend would be excellent.
|
| You can look at my profile and various papers we've published
| about why code on laptops is both hard technically and draw your
| own conclusions beyond that.
|
| As an aside, I also use IntelliJ on my own projects for Rust. The
| Rust LSP is getting there, but nothing beats IntelliJ Rust yet,
| and that's been my experience across the suite. JetBrains tackles
| the hardest 20% of the problems (like partial compilation and
| indexing) and executes extremely well.
| [deleted]
| Groxx wrote:
| It has some semi-minor issues still (e.g. resizing panes, last
| I tried it, would only move a few pixels before losing the
| "drag"), and it's not as efficient as VSCode (which is a pretty
| high bar, to be fair), but there is a "Projector" for many of
| their IDEs: https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-run-android-studio-
| on-any-dev...
|
| It's not quite good enough on my bandwidth to make me switch
| from VSCode for remote work, but it's pretty close. And the day
| it is, I will be _thrilled_ to abandon VSCode 's horrible Go
| plugins.
| jvolkman wrote:
| Wow. I'm amazed they haven't relaxed the no-code-on-laptops
| rule this year.
| easytiger wrote:
| > remote desktop to my workstation to use IntelliJ and CLion
| remotely, which is a middling experience at best.
|
| i had to do this for a while. Genuinely awful experience over
| the citrix thing and best possible connection situation.
|
| > As an aside, I also use IntelliJ on my own projects for Rust.
| The Rust LSP is getting there, but nothing beats IntelliJ Rust
| yet,
|
| Thanks for saying this. I'm trying to pivot to using rust for a
| greenfield project. Just gave up on the emacs rust set up as it
| was tremendously frustrating to use
| pitaj wrote:
| rust-analyzer works very well for me, definitely don't use
| RLS.
| random5634 wrote:
| The key thing with idea is to have a fast machine - finally with
| a amd 5600 the speed is not annoying
| hotz wrote:
| I couldn't agree more. It was brutal on my work MacBook. The
| Ryzen with 32GB RAM is heaven.
| newlisper wrote:
| Yep, can't use them because I have 4GB RAM macbook air.
| kosolam wrote:
| You should only compare by specific language/stack. Not as a
| whole. For Java I'd use IDEA. For JS maybe I'd go with vscode.
| For Rust I also used IDEA and preferred it over the vscode rust
| setup. However, didn't check as of late, maybe vscode rust
| experience because better now.
| harel wrote:
| I keep trying to use idea... But that crazy autosave I cannot
| disable always drives me back to vscode
| fctorial wrote:
| I'm getting a 404. Does anyone have a backup copy?
| webstrand wrote:
| Found a backup here: https://archive.vn/nNdT1
| dgan wrote:
| I am new to Rust, and started first with VSCode, and I never
| managed to make plugin work properly. Again, an experienced user
| will be able to fix the problem, but I am not.
|
| what about Intellij with Rust plugin? Install plugin, start
| coding. Done.
|
| And I can't imagine doing Java in anything else than Intellij
| (have tried Eclipse at some point)
| roxx wrote:
| The rust plugin is a common pitfall, install the rust-analyzer
| plugin and you shouldn't run into any problems in vscode.
| domano wrote:
| Language support in VSCode for Go breaks in unexpected ways after
| every update of Go, VSCode or any plugin involved. gopls has not
| helped at all so far.
|
| Golang or IntelliJ with the Go plugin just work. I have been
| trying to use Code instead of IDEA for 3 years and it is just not
| worth it. VSCode startup also is not as fast anymore, so that USP
| is gone as well.
|
| Debugging features are not even comparable, the difference is day
| and night.
|
| I tried fixing it again and again but never in my whole journey
| has there been a moment where everything just works, just as
| Goland did since it became stable.
|
| It is cheaper to use IDEA Ultimate instead of wasting a few
| minutes every day fighting with my IDE.
| domano wrote:
| Oh and i want to add that VSCode actually created a lot of
| damage for me.
|
| There were multiple instances where i practiced a live coding
| session for some talk or other a day before and after arriving
| to the venue Code language support _just broke_ for some reason
| or other. This happened like 50% of the time. One time if
| destroyed a lot of the session because it just automatically
| did nonsensical imports during my live coding!
| bacbilla wrote:
| I use VSCode for 95 percent of my development and I couldn't be
| happier. I use IntelliJ for the other 5 percent (which is just
| Groovy scripting for a particular product).
|
| For the way I work, it fits very well.
|
| - I write nearly exclusively a mixture of CPP and Typescript.
| Particularly in projects which mix these languages (and for
| Typescript as a whole), I have not found anything better. - I use
| the remote SSH feature heavily. I have a bottom of the range
| MacBook Pro but I use a reserved t3a.xlarge instance in AWS for
| all my development. It's blazingly fast and I know that if my
| laptop was to explode I could be working again in 5 minutes
| (which is important to me being self employed) - Any software
| that I ship to clients I ship with a container configuration.
| Even if they do not use VSCode themselves, if they have a problem
| they can spin up my exact development environment and run tests,
| step through debug etc. - GitHub settings sync seems quite useful
| although I have not needed to use it yet.
|
| However, VSCode weak points:
|
| -- Terraform support is awful. Hashicorp seem to have completely
| broken the related plugins since they took over maintenance of
| them.
|
| - The CPP debugging experience is not as rich as full Visual
| Studio (which is fair enough). I occasionally miss things like
| the memory window.
|
| - Java/Groovy support is poor.
|
| Overall, 10/10 happy VSCode user.
| frabbit wrote:
| IntelliJ IDEA's Powershell support (via plugin1) is very poor.
| Both VSCode (predictably) and Atom are superior. It is the one
| reason why I keep VSCode around.
|
| 1. https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/10249-powershell
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Offtopic: I can't seem to resolve this website through
| CloudFlare's DNS servers, what's going on here? Are they blocking
| Cloudflare's resolvers? Is there something wrong with Cloudflare?
| What is going on here?
|
| In my experience, IDEA is just better in the things it does well
| and just worse in the things it doesn't. Without spending days
| searching for extensions and configurations, Jetbrains' products
| beat Code every time when it comes to Java and the related
| ecosystem. When it comes to C/C++, Clion is one of the best IDEs
| there are, and VS code can only get close through extensions and
| a buttload of JSON.
|
| For frontend, both suck equally as much, but that's just because
| modern development has turned into a Javascript mess and frontend
| developers seem to make it their personal mission to change up
| and replace the entire ecosystem every five years. No IDE can
| keep up with such an ecosystem without becoming janky and
| unpredictable.
|
| The language server feature of Code makes it excellent for
| languages that weren't originally included in the product. For
| example, Clion has Rust support, but that support comes nowhere
| near what VS Code can do with the Rust Analyzer addon. Other
| languages have similar problems with Jetbrains' products; the
| language server for Code makes it integrate with other languages
| so well that the two barely even compete.
|
| But, for most of the work I do, the advantages of VS Code seem
| irrelevant to me. If you develop in a quirky or brand new
| language, use WSL2 (because you can't or won't use normal Linux)
| or if you're writing C# code on and for Windows, then it makes
| sense to use Code, but I just don't see a lot of people with
| these problems.
|
| The biggest advantage of VS Code I can see is that through its
| addons, it gets to become fully-featured for free. You might
| argue that it's open source as well, but as far as I know there's
| still functionality that Microsoft has hidden away (C# debugging)
| in open source builds due to licensing issues. In my opinion the
| pricing on Jetbrains' tools is pretty good; the tools have
| increased my productivity enough that I'm more than willing to
| invest in these tools.
| AndroidKitKat wrote:
| Re: Offtopic
|
| Yeah, the owner of those archive.* websites blocks CloudFlare
| DNS because of some hate-boner for CloudFlare [1]. Really
| unfortunate, honestly.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
| maple3142 wrote:
| In my opinion, one killer feature of VSCode is the ability to
| connect to WSL, remote server and Docker container. As someone
| mainly developing on WSL2, I use this feature everyday. I only
| use Idea when I need to use Java or Kotlin, because its language
| support is really good.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Intellij 2021.1 has the feature called run targets, which
| enable to run your code on a docker environment or on a remote
| server. It also bring WSL support.
| https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2021/03/intellij-idea-2021-1...
| dalai wrote:
| There is also projector and "code with me", but they still
| have some work to do before they reach feature parity in that
| regard. At least they are working on it.
|
| https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-226455#focus=Comme.
| ..
| whateveracct wrote:
| > or Kotlin, because its language support is really good.
|
| I've been using Kotlin for about a year now at work. I feel
| that "IDEA has good Kotlin support" isn't quite the right way
| to say it. It's become clear to me that the language is
| explicitly designed to be read and written in IDEA. Receivers
| (changing `this` per-scope) and `it` (to a lesser degree) are
| really poor syntax features to read in plaintext. But IDEA
| automatically adds the plaintext for you so you don't notice.
|
| Genius business move by JetBrains. Get some corporations hooked
| on some sugar on top of Java, and now they have to pay that fat
| license forever.
| dsissitka wrote:
| It looks like JetBrains' Projector went 1.0 last month.
| mellosouls wrote:
| I agree with this; I bought the professional license of PyCharm
| on the basis of its "remote development" functionality which I
| assumed would meet the (admitted) easy "it just works"
| standards of everything else in Idea.
|
| It never worked, not even close and I ended up dumping it and
| returning to VS Code because the remote stuff (particularly to
| linux VMs and containers) was a deal-breaker.
|
| Real missed opportunity I thought, it had been a long-standing
| bug when I looked into it, and very very oversold as
| functionality present in the professional version.
| salex89 wrote:
| I've seen this being mentioned in other comments, and besides
| WSL2, I've used PyCharm (a close relative to IDEA) connected to
| containers, Vagrant and plain VMs for years. I suppose the rest
| of the IntelliJ products have the same support, and WSL2 being
| rolled out, obviously?
| vbsteven wrote:
| WSL support is in IntelliJ now. Makes it super easy to use
| jdk/node and other toolchains on the WSL side from IntelliJ
| running on the windows side
| zappo2938 wrote:
| Until four months ago I used PHPStorm although I haven't typed a
| line of PHP code in at least 4 years. Since all my coding is with
| TypeScript I decided to switch to VSCode and not renew my Idea
| subscription.
|
| The only feature I miss is the local history. It is nice to be
| able to aggressively hash out code to solve a complicated problem
| and revert to the state 1 minute, 5 minutes, or 20 minutes ago or
| at least look at the diff.
| sdfhbdf wrote:
| Only? Wow.
|
| When I juggle between vim, sublime, VS Code and PHPStorm/IDEA.
| I tend to come back to IDEA for any project bigger than a few
| files since the after the indexing the refactor, code analysis,
| search and auto import functionality is so reliable that I just
| love the ease of use. I still have the free education license
| and a company license so I am not sure whether I'd pay for
| JetBrains out of my own pocket but difference in the tooling is
| night and day, it's much more robust and quicker to get stuff
| done than VS Code in my experience
| hasperdi wrote:
| There is a local history extension in the marketplace. It's a
| huge timesaver for me. Check it out
| quercusa wrote:
| Which one do you like?
| siliconc0w wrote:
| Another difference is leveraging container orchestration tools
| (compose on the low end or k8s on the high end) to manage your
| dev+ environments. The editor used to take a big role in managing
| that but now I don't want that because I need the dev environment
| to be highly reproducible and a full environment is usually
| pretty complex with multiple apps and one or more datastores.
| sto_hristo wrote:
| I almost use always vscode via it's ssh remote development
| feature. In my experience this thing is flawless and
| indistinguishable from local development. It's hardly believable
| how good they've made it.
|
| The idea vs. code is something i don't buy. Each has its use
| cases. Idea has great tools for android development, it's just
| tightly geared towards that, which is especially good for someone
| that is not a main android developer and need to those extra
| wheels. While vscode is my go to editor for everything else,
| including java ee.
| mythz wrote:
| I used to think VS Code was going to be a threat to JetBrains
| IDEs considering how fast its iterative development was (thanks
| in large part to the productivity of JS + Web renderer) but its
| never seems to quite be able to reach the feature-set, polish &
| intelligence of JetBrains IDEs.
|
| Every IDE function appears to be better implemented in JetBrains,
| whether it's Code Analysis, Refactoring, Navigation,
| Running/Debugging, Running Tests, adding new files, git
| integration or contextual functionality like adding package
| references etc. Everything is just better in JetBrains.
|
| I see VS Code as an ubiquitous smart editor platform with
| zillions of plugins that's half way between a glorified text
| editor and an IDE which I use a lot for quick dev changes,
| quickly searching a folder, front-end UI development, trying out
| new languages or writing docs. But if I have to start a long dev
| session I turn to JetBrains which I find far more productive.
| africanboy wrote:
| in my experience Intellij looks better if you have coded in
| Inttellij first (especially Java) and then moved to othet
| tools.
|
| Intellij offers a lot of custom behaviours that IMO programmers
| start coding the "Intellij way" (let's call it Intellij muscle
| memory for lack of a better definition) on the other hand going
| from vi to Emacs to Sublime to VSCode is less of a problem and
| people tend to honestly judge strength and weaknesses of each
| one.
|
| For example magit is so good (for me) that until the magit
| plugin for VSCode came out I kept an instance of Emacs running
| only to interact with the git repository.
|
| Intellij git integration in comparison, in my opinion, it's
| barely usable and generally counter intuitive.
|
| BTW the java plugin bundle for VSCode replicates 95% of the
| features of Intellij, except for some formatting styles and a
| few of the refactoring facilities that I could not reproduce, I
| switched from Intellij to VSCode without looking back. There's
| even a keyboard bindings plugin for VSCode that perfectly maps
| IJ keyboard shortcuts.
|
| If only the VSCode java ecosystem was refined as it is today 2
| years ago when the project I am working on started, I would
| have never even downloaded Intellij.
|
| If I had an euro for every time I had to "Invalidate cache and
| restart" on Intellij to make it recognize some trivial change,
| I would be rich now.
|
| Having said that: they are different products for different
| targets.
|
| Intellij has a huge advantage in corporate environments where
| conformity, uniformity and easily replacing team members are
| paramount, VSCode is an highly customizable code editor that
| fits a different use case where each member of the team prefers
| to customize the working experience as much as possible.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| > in my experience Intellij looks better if you have coded in
| Inttellij first (especially Java) and then moved to othet
| tools.
|
| I have started with notepad and moved through vi, Eclipse,
| VSCode and then IntelliJ. Out of these I used Eclipse and
| IntelliJ for Java and IntelliJ wins hands down when it comes
| to the quality of the features, atleast for Java.
|
| > Intellij offers a lot of custom behaviours that IMO
| programmers start coding the "Intellij way" (let's call it
| Intellij muscle memory for lack of a better definition) on
| the other hand going from vi to Emacs to Sublime to VSCode is
| less of a problem and people tend to honestly judge strength
| and weaknesses of each one.
|
| Since I didn't start with IntelliJ, I didn't have any baggage
| of muscle memory etc but the ease of refactoring and the
| quality of autocomplete/suggestions of refactoring takes it
| beyond an editor to almost a companion. It doesn't nag and
| you are free to ignore its suggestions but hell those are
| pretty good suggestions. I use a few keyboard shortcuts like
| jumping to definition and checking usage so I don't have any
| keyboard focused attachment to IntelliJ. Infact I use vi
| keybindings in both VSCode and IntelliJ.
|
| > Intellij git integration in comparison, in my opinion, it's
| barely usable and generally counter intuitive.
|
| IntelliJ's git integration is definitely not barely useable
| and not counter intuitive either (I started with command line
| git and then worked on IntelliJ). The only gripe I have is
| that occasionally I want to create a branch from a tag and I
| need to do that from the command line. Everything else works
| seamlessly.
|
| > If I had an euro for every time I had to "Invalidate cache
| and restart" on Intellij to make it recognize some trivial
| change, I would be rich now.
|
| I've had to do invalidate cache and restart about 2 times in
| last two years so while it is not a great use of my time when
| I have to do it, its not a big bother considering it is rare
| for me.
|
| > Intellij has a huge advantage in corporate environments
| where conformity, uniformity and easily replacing team
| members are paramount, VSCode is an highly customizable code
| editor that fits a different use case where each member of
| the team prefers to customize the working experience as much
| as possible.
|
| In my team, the average period folks have been with the firm
| is 3 years so easily replacing people is not a priority
| (because they are not leaving left, right and center). Also,
| I'm not even sure if that makes any difference, because its
| not like we are coding style nazis carrying out IntelliJ
| dictated formatting (we use Sonarlint for linting and only
| expect people to code in a manner that is easy to understand
| and maintain). Almost all team members have used Eclipse /
| VSCode and atleast for Java, after they used IntelliJ, they
| haven't gone back to either.
| africanboy wrote:
| > Almost all team members have used Eclipse / VSCode and
| atleast for Java, after they used IntelliJ, they haven't
| gone back to either.
|
| I was also using it because my team was using it and it
| holds value to share a screen and watch the same thing or
| when debugging an issue replicating the same exact steps,
| having different tools can make it harder.
|
| My point is that when you have a stable setup any setup is
| good if it's good for you, Intellij is better on some
| things but worse on other that I personally value more
|
| the git integration for example, which works backwards
| compared to how git works: stage/commit/push
|
| in Intellij I am presented with all the tracked files
| already staged, the commit message box is already filled
| with the last one, files are showed as a tree instead of
| the classic list with paths and I have to look for
| untracked files that are collapsed by default.
|
| Magit is much simpler and intuitive IMO.
|
| > I've had to do invalidate cache and restart about 2 times
| in last two years so while it is not a great use of my time
| when I have to do it, its not a big bother considering it
| is rare for me.
|
| I wish it was like that for me.
|
| Or probably I am simply doing something wrong but no amount
| of Google fu helped me to avoid the issue, the only thing
| that works is pushing the damned "invalidate and restart"
| button (and sometimes running mvn idea:idea from the
| command line, but I gather it is obsolete and not actively
| supported anymore)
| e3k wrote:
| I had the exact same feeling arriving into projects using
| PyCharm: somehow I could feel PyCharm's influence over the
| code and ignorance of the non-IDEA tools (e.g.
| makefile/isort/black, which are usually superior/easier to
| use than the mouse oriented interface of PyCharm). I even use
| a phrase for the way they are developed: PyCharm oriented
| development.
|
| VSCode is better at first, unless you need to work with
| Python 2.7, where it fails completely: there is no good lsp
| for it (intellisense fails), and working this problem around
| by downgrading to ctags does not work either.
|
| The best I can say about them is that both has decent multi
| cursor implementation.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Something Java accidentally did was be impossible to code
| without an IDE, in part because of its type system. People
| wrote really good IDEs for it, _aided_ by the type system. At
| some point, they realized they could use what they learned
| and adapt the IDE to other languages.
| matsemann wrote:
| At least most of our java program is written by us.
| Compared to visual studio (not vs code) where a wizard will
| generate thousands of lines of config no one dares to touch
| again or know how to modify.
| matsemann wrote:
| > Intellij git integration in comparison, in my opinion, it's
| barely usable and generally counter intuitive.
|
| Disagree. I use it all the time. It's sooo nice to have the
| different changelists. Easy to make changes that I don't want
| to accidentally commit by putting them on a different
| changelist (like pointing to a different database). And it
| can be split even in the same file, much more easily to
| commit parts like this than using git -p.
|
| > BTW the java plugin bundle for VSCode replicates 95% of the
| features of Intellij,
|
| If you only look at the textual java code, perhaps. But it
| lacks the awareness of the rest of the java ecosystem that
| Intellij provides.
| spullara wrote:
| I think the git support used to be worse but now it is
| pretty great imho.
| azeirah wrote:
| Part of it feels like it comes from a different development
| philosophy.
|
| Vscode is a "text editor" or a "code editor". Usually this
| means that it's fairly lightweight, supports every language
| under the sun, is highly configurable and extensible, but
| doesn't have a lot of very in-depth features, and also
| partially relies on third-party extensions for deeper
| functionality.
|
| Jetbrains on the other hand works on IDEs built for one
| specific language explicitly. Consider CLion for C, it's only a
| couple of years old!
|
| They put a lot of resources into supporting a language and all
| its relevant workflows. Phpstorm for instance has built-in
| support for three different standalone code quality checkers,
| composer (package manager) support, deep language understanding
| with highlighting, warning, errors, refactorings, generators
| etc, doc comments, code formatting, support for different
| testing frameworks, a built-in debugger, etcetcetc...
|
| While that's great, you shouldn't go edit python code in
| Phpstorm. It supports syntax highlighting and maybe a couple of
| other small features, but that's it!
|
| In short, code editors usually cast a really wide net with a
| lot of configurability and extensibility, while (jetbrains)
| IDEs tend to go really deep on a single language or workflow,
| with less extensibility, and deep configurability within the
| supported language itself.
| cyral wrote:
| One thing to note is that you can use IntelliJ and install
| the official plugins for each language. For example you can
| bring the WebStorm functionality to IntelliJ, or install the
| database plugin to get an embedded Datagrip window. (Which is
| really neat because you can then get SQL syntax highlighting
| and such based on your actual DB)
| vinger wrote:
| How does the open source IDEA plus php plugin experience
| compare to phpstorm?
| yrio wrote:
| The plugins for alternative languages (PHP, Python) are
| available only for IntelliJ Ultimate / paid. It's not
| available in free / open source IntelliJ
|
| So either [1] you buy IntelliJ Ultimate & get Java +
| other languages (PHP, Python, Ruby, etc except .NET and
| C++)
|
| or [2] you buy the language specific IDE (cheaper) like
| PhpStorm, PyCharm, etc
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| That didn't used to be the case. You used to be able to
| add the Python plugin to the free IDEA ide and that would
| give you java + pycharm - but only the free tier features
| of pycharm.
|
| However, if you used the paid IDEA, adding the Python
| plugin gave you full PyCharm capabilities EXCEPT that
| IDEA was always based on version N of the core IDE
| platform where PyCharm was based on N+1 version, i.e. the
| smaller pycharm IDE sometimes had some newer platform
| features than the IDEA ide which led to occasional
| differences between IDEA + Python plugin vs PyCharm.
|
| I switched to VSCode last year and let my licence lapse
| for Intellij so things may have changed.
|
| What i will say, despite having moved to VSCode and being
| entirely happy - Intellij is the better platform. It's
| the difference between 80% and 99% though, and the VSCode
| 80% is good enough. If i went back to full time dev, i
| would buy another jetbrains licence.
| amitport wrote:
| Well just note that this doesn't work with all combination
| of languages. Try installing CLion on webstorm for example.
| [deleted]
| irrational wrote:
| IntelliJ ultimate is the main IDE. Everything else is a
| version of IntelliJ that has been configured for a
| specific language. IntelliJ should, theoretically, be
| able to behave like any of the sub-IDEs, but the reverse
| is not true.
| dagmx wrote:
| Theoretically yes. In practice no. Each IDE has workflows
| and features tuned to their respective domain.
|
| They're not just simple configuration changes from each
| other
| snuxoll wrote:
| The simplified setup for modules in the language-specific
| IDEs alone makes them worth it IMO. It's great that the
| plugins in IntelliJ cover basically everything but CLion,
| AppCode and Rider - but if I'm working on Python,
| JavaScript, PHP or doing database work I'll still fire up
| Pycharm, WebStorm, PHPStorm and DataGrip respectively
| because there's less overhead getting my project imported
| (and DataGrip is more useful as a standalone DBA tool
| because I open it and all of my connections are right
| there).
|
| Given the individual license cost difference between
| IntelliJ Ultimate and the All Products Pack is minimal
| it's worth it, especially given it's cheaper than
| IntelliJ + CLion separately.
| Macha wrote:
| Even just using the correct language terms is helpful.
| IntelliJ modules contain packages, because that's how
| Java works, which makes it super confusing when your
| modules are python packages and its subunit (called
| package in the UI) is a python module.
| dagmx wrote:
| Yeah by the time you need two IDEs you might as well just
| get the suite.
|
| It also worked out well for me because I bought Ultimate
| on sale, and the suite was discounted for existing
| owners. So it's really been good savings. Regardless,
| given the time savings the IDEs give me, they pay
| themselves off pretty quickly.
| spullara wrote:
| As much as that is true, I have a license for all of them
| and always use a few of them instead of the main IDE:
| CLion, Goland and Rider being the ones that are really
| much better for their respective domains because they are
| so different.
| jayjader wrote:
| I wonder if you have had the chance to use a Jetbrains IDE
| with a professional license. Doing so gives you access to
| more or less the content of all the other "flavors" as
| plugins (it's basically all IntelliJ underneath).
|
| For example, I've been using PyCharm for both our python
| backend _and_ our React + Typescript frontend, all in the
| same project window, with the same features regarding syntax,
| linting, refactoring, tests, debugging, etc.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| This has been my experience with JS as well. No difference
| between Webstorm or IDEA with a few minutes spent on
| configuration.
| Longhanks wrote:
| It does not for C/C++, you need CLion for that.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| You can also use Resharper C/C++ in Visual Studio and
| Rider C++ for Unreal Engine.
| malkia wrote:
| I've been using it for the last 3 years. At first it was
| slow, and running out of memory (it was in-process in
| Visual Studio, which is limited to 32-bits), but now that
| they've moved a lot to out-of-process it's much better!
| sammorrowdrums wrote:
| And Rust, as the debugger only works for Rust in CLion.
|
| I use PyCharm and WebStorm daily, and CLion for Rust
| projects at the moment.
| danieldk wrote:
| Debugging is also available in PyCharm starting with the
| 2021.1 EAPs:
|
| https://intellij-
| rust.github.io/2021/03/01/changelog-142.htm...
| azeirah wrote:
| I have. IntelliJ ultimate edition still has fewer features
| for PHP specifically than Phpstorm.
|
| Presumably not because it actually has fewer features, but
| because "the debugger" now has 150 options instead of like
| 5.
|
| Also, these super-featured IDEs still won't support
| languages that Jetbrains doesn't have a specific IDE for.
| For instance, Delphi. Sure they'll support syntax
| highlighting somehow, and there might be one plugin.
|
| VSCode probably has 20+ search results if you look up
| Delphi
| gcbirzan wrote:
| Generally, they should come in the next version. Or that
| was their stance for PyCharm/IntelliJ ultimate.
| rob74 wrote:
| As someone who used to develop in Delphi for my day job,
| but has been mostly out of the loop for the last ~10
| years, this really got me curious: do people actually use
| VSCode for _Delphi_? I mean, Delphi already comes with an
| IDE, including a GUI ( "Forms") designer - that was its
| killer feature back in the nineties, that you could slap
| together a GUI app as quickly as in good ol' Visual
| Basic, but backed by a compiled language. Maybe the text
| editor is better in VSCode, but still I imagine it's
| pretty hard to deliver the same experience as with the
| "native" Delphi IDE? So I can understand that JetBrains
| doesn't see a huge market for that (unless they could
| become the official Delphi IDE, like they did with
| Android Studio).
| FpUser wrote:
| I have current Delphi project with heavy GUI. I'd be out
| of my mind to use VS Code for it. I use VS code for
| scripting stuff where it more or less shines (JS, Bash
| scripts etc). Same for C++ - Visual Studio/QT Creator and
| CLion fill my needs way better than VS Code can ever do.
| blowski wrote:
| It also kills performance when you have so many languages
| configured.
| AlphaSite wrote:
| Just 5row money at the problem and configure your machine
| with more memory. Docker for Mac already eats a ton so
| I'm not sure there aren't other good reasons to do so.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I did not try that myself, but I think that you can
| switch enabled plugins with a simple text file. So you
| should be able to write simple BAT files to launch Idea
| for different sets of plugins if you need to.
|
| Or may be there are better ways to do so. Anyway just
| enable what you need.
| jayd16 wrote:
| There are some contradicting layout schemes across the
| languages and for that I'm glad Jetbrains provides the
| language specific flavors.
| headmelted wrote:
| There is most certainly a lot baked into the language-
| specific editors that isn't in IDEA proper.
|
| That said, the fact that they all share IDEA's gubbins
| makes it massively easier to jump between languages and
| frameworks for small jobs than I ever thought would be
| possible.
|
| Having a set of tailored environments that also share
| keybindings and most common features makes for a fantastic
| (and really under-appreciated) value proposition.
| dagmx wrote:
| It really depends on the language and IDE.
|
| For example I used to just own Idea Ultimate and use the
| language plugins, but the workflows were always inferior to
| using the dedicated IDE for that language.
|
| So I now have the full JetBrains suite and use a mix of
| Rider, CLion, PyCharm Pro, AppCode etc...
| dehrmann wrote:
| Turns out 99% of my work is in something like Java, Python,
| or JS. Once you include other JVM languages, C++, PHP, and
| Ruby, IDEA's coverage is huge. They even have C#, Objective
| C, and Switft offerings, but there's something to be said for
| staying in those ecosystems.
| neonological wrote:
| Intellij allows you to install pretty much most of the
| features from all the other jetbrains IDEs as plugins.
| Additionally most of their IDE's have the ability to code in
| several other languages seperate from the core experience.
| Almost all of their IDE's can for example integrate with the
| javascript ecosystem.
|
| I think you're making a mistake here. Essentially behind the
| scenes there's one jetbrains IDE. This IDE is a single
| platform that can take plugins and code in any language and
| be customizable to your hearts content.
|
| ON the surface however Jetbrains doesn't exactly release this
| IDE to the public. They deliver different configurations and
| different defaults on TOP of this IDE, then they lock it down
| a little and ship each one of these profiles under a
| different name. All these IDE's are basically different
| bundles of plugins running on the exact same core platform.
|
| That's why CLion is only a couple years old and still really
| good. It's because all Jetbrains needed to develop was a
| plugin and shove it into an existing ecosystem.
|
| This is no different then Vscode when you think about it.
| Both are coding platforms that can be plugged with new
| features, it's just that jetbrains locks some of this
| customization down and sells their IDEs with bundles of
| plugins that offers a better core experience.
|
| What makes Jetbrains better is this focused and higher
| quality bundle of features that feels cohesive. What makes
| jetbrains worse is that this central platform they're
| developing for is bloated. Everything is slow, takes forever
| and can lock up.
|
| If Jetbrains just did something to speed up the platform then
| pretty much IMO it beats anything Vscode has to offer.
| leetcrew wrote:
| I think that sounds about right. I see vs code as a jack-of-
| all-trades, master-of-none type of tool. if I want to try
| something in a new language or just edit some text real quick
| (I find vs code has better than average support for weird text
| encodings) but keep a familiar ui, I go with vs code. if I'm
| going to be doing some more in-depth work, I'll spend the time
| to learn a purpose-built tool. I mostly write c++ for windows,
| and I find vs code can't really compete with its big brother
| (bloated as it is) here.
| brightball wrote:
| This sums it up for me. For languages with a dedicated
| Jetbrains IDE (Java, Ruby, Python, etc) Jetbrains will be
| better experience hands down.
|
| For everything that doesn't have the premium experience, I
| find that just using plugins isn't as effective.
|
| For example, the experience of using IDEA with the Elixir
| plugin hasn't been great despite a lot of development. It
| seems like it constantly loses the proper SDK if I jump
| between projects.
|
| The VS Code experience has been a lot better for Elixir
| though. Just works. The moment Jetbrains releases a dedicated
| Elixir IDE I'd jump for it though.
| cutler wrote:
| Why the assumption that a separate editor needs to be
| released? IntelliJ with language plugins is better.
| brightball wrote:
| Hadn't been my experience thus far.
| perrylaj wrote:
| I agree. Intellij ultimate is the best polyglot work
| environment I've ever used. The primary project I work on
| has Java, kotlin, groovy, python, typescript, js, shell
| scripts, dockerfiles, various configuration files, etc.
| Intellij Ultimate handles them all equally well as the
| more specific language flavors in my experience.
| xirbeosbwo1234 wrote:
| >thanks in large part to the productivity of JS + Web renderer
|
| Oh heavens no. I can't think of a single program written with
| "web technologies" that is in the same league of complexity as
| proper desktop applications. And IDEA is already enough of a
| resource hog; let's not make things worse!
| EasyTiger_ wrote:
| Agree, PHPStorm for me is a productivity monster
| herdcall wrote:
| Not sure how many devs code in a single language these days. I
| go back/forth between Go, Dart, and C++ every day, so using one
| IDE like VSCode (with the familiar features from extensions to
| shortcuts to snippets) is a big help.
| derekperkins wrote:
| I think the vast majority of devs work in a single language,
| at least on a day to day basis.
| mythz wrote:
| I do have to maintain libraries in several languages,
| basically every JetBrains IDE has built-in first-class
| support for JS/TypeScript + all popular Web file formats
| irrespective of whatever backend language you're developing
| in.
|
| For C#, F# & VB I use Rider.
|
| For Dart, Java & Kotlin I use Android Studio, but if I need
| to do a lot of development with Java/Kotlin I'll bounce to
| IDEA.
|
| For TypeScript/JS npm projects I use VS Code for small
| changes, but bounce to WebStorm for longer sessions.
|
| For the Swift package I use Xcode for development & VS Code
| for git, update docs & run publish scripts. Unfortunately ran
| into issues trying to build my project with AppCode.
|
| For all other languages (used to develop project templates &
| packages for https://gist.cafe) I'll use VS Code, but that's
| mainly because I don't have the IDE installed. If I had to
| spend more than a couple of days working on a language that
| JetBrains offers a dedicated IDE for I'll most likely be
| installing & trying that out, before falling back to VS Code
| (JetBrains All Products Pack + Unified Toolbox Updates makes
| this effortless & feasible).
| malkia wrote:
| I wish JetBrains looked exactly into that, and deliver one
| IDE with above (^^^).
| layoric wrote:
| I don't since you end up with either complex configuration
| to surface language specific tasks. Having well thought out
| defaults, tools, etc by separating them out into different
| IDEs allows for ease of use you couldn't get with one IDE
| to rule them all approach. Yes, they sell different IDEs
| that share a large core but I think the incentives are well
| aligned for sustainable business focused on developer
| satisfaction.
| rfw300 wrote:
| It's worth noting you can set up shared settings between
| every Jetbrains IDE which will sync up all of your
| keybindings, color schemes, etc.
| derimagia wrote:
| Jetbrains provides plugins for Intellij that support almost
| every other language they have a "dedicated IDE" for. That's
| what I do and it supports almost every language I throw at
| it. The exceptions that I know of are Rider and parts of
| Android Studio
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Jetbrains IDEs performance is so abysmal I quickly get annoyed
| and move to something else. Same with XCode.
|
| I find VSCode to be the most feature rich editor whose speed I
| can tolerate. VSCode is by no means ideal in terms of resource
| consumptions or startup speed but the community picked up
| VSCode for the golden path in the languages I code with (rust,
| node.js, frontend js) and using other lighter editors is a
| significant downgrade.
|
| Sublime was incredibly promising but it's not enough feature
| wise for my experience. I'd literally throw money into a native
| and more performant/lightweight VSCode.
| dschuessler wrote:
| There are several projects attempting to develop a native
| smart editor. For Mac users there is Nova (https://nova.app/)
| and for the Vim crowd there is Onivim (https://onivim.io/).
|
| I have used neither of them but I find them intriguing,
| especially when I wait for my VSCode cursor to catch up with
| my typing.
| usrusr wrote:
| A somewhat radical rephrasing would be that the IDEA products
| occupy the space that used to be held by Borland IDE or
| something like Quick Basic whereas VSCode seems more like an
| Emacs for the javascript age. (which I find surprisingly
| fitting, considering how according to The good Parts javascript
| is just a scheme with curlies)
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| VS Code is also pretty nice for free. I wouldn't use it
| professionally if I had Idea. But for home use, free is pretty
| ok.
| specialp wrote:
| The plugin infrastructure for VS Code along with excellent
| first party support for JS/TS has helped it grow very fast. But
| in languages other than TS the mishmash of plugins of varying
| quality really degrade the experience. The opinionated approach
| and strong first party support just makes Jet Brains product
| much cleaner. I use both a lot.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Indeed, I haven't used VS Code a lot but my few experiences
| with it were largely figuring out which of the available
| plugins for a particular function was the "right" one, with
| all of them sitting at various levels of "working". The
| IntelliJ, Sublime, and heck even TextMate 2 plugin experience
| is cleaner in that regard.
| randomsearch wrote:
| I agree, I also think sibling comment about vs code being a
| generic text editor is a fair point.
|
| I've tried to move to vs code several times as I like using the
| "default" (same reason I use Ubuntu) but webstorm is just
| better IMO.
| harikb wrote:
| I use both. IntelliJ being a paid personal subscription. I like
| both. But VsCode excels in their remote editing capabilities.
| Sometimes I work on code that will only compile on a Linux and
| I am on a Mac. It is not just remote debugging - the whole
| environment including language server works flawlessly via
| remote while making you feel like local development.
|
| It is good for two good IDEs to survive. I don't want one of
| them to win. There is room for two.
|
| I only wish the opensource development model of plugins (for
| both IntelliJ and VsCode) doesn't come to bite us one day with
| a rogue developer inserting malware. The whole
| review/reputation system should be like Apple App Store
| reader_mode wrote:
| This right here is what could get me to switch.
|
| I could theoretically host an IDE on a workstation and
| develop from anywhere with a browser.
|
| Unfortunately it's not ideal yet - remote editor wouldn't let
| me touch files not owned by session user (even when I could
| sudo) and similar issues.
| hansvm wrote:
| I still mostly just SSH onto a workstation for any of my
| personal work, but every month or two I'll check out the
| latest batch of self-hosted remote IDEs. My favorite by far
| (with caveats -- a few of your favorite extensions have
| licensing issues, and the mobile UI is garbage) is a fork
| of VS Code designed for doing exactly that. Check out
| https://github.com/cdr/code-server.
| khaledh wrote:
| I've been programming with various IDEs and text editors for over
| 30 years. In my formative programming years (1990s) I relied
| heavily on Borland and Microsoft IDEs. In the 2000s it was a
| combination of Visual Studio (C/C++/C#) and various editors (PHP,
| HTML/CSS/JS). In the 2010s I started working across multiple
| languages: C#, Java, Python, Ruby, Elixir, Scala, JavaScript
| (also dabbled with Lisp, Go, and Rust); using various tools:
| Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, VS Code, Atom, Sublime, Vim, and
| even Emacs.
|
| My opinion: JetBrains IDEs beat every single other IDE/editor
| hands down (Visual Studio -- not Code -- comes close). The level
| of integration and polish is unmatched. I use PyCharm on a daily
| basis at work and the level of productivity I get out if it is
| far beyond what I get from any other IDE/editor. I've been
| developing a hobby kernel recently using C, and initially used
| VSCode; it was OK. Then I thought I'd give JetBrains CLion a try
| and I never looked back. I happily paid for license and it's been
| a well spent investment.
| varispeed wrote:
| The only reason I use VS Code is when I want to quickly check a
| file or create a PoC. PyCharm or CLion are just too slow and
| frustrating, but for bigger projects there is no better option
| than those, despite being awfully slow.
| danieldk wrote:
| On what platform are you using these IDEs? I use CLion daily
| and it is very fast on my Linux machine with a Ryzen 3700X
| CPU.
|
| (I have heard complaints that the JetBrains IDEs are much
| slower on Macs, which also corresponds with my limited
| experience of using their IDEs on a Mac.)
| spockz wrote:
| I never really realised this, but IntelliJ feels almost
| instant on my fedora workstation whereas there is a certain
| sluggishness on Mac in the ui. Resizing panels, context
| menus, the terminals.
| closeparen wrote:
| I think it's less about the platform and more about the
| size of the code to index. Text editors are about as fast
| in a repo with 30,000 files as in a repo with 3. IDEs can
| take a few minutes to do the indexing necessary to support
| their code intelligence on bigger repos.
| mhaberl wrote:
| I had the same experience, used Visual Studio for C++, and
| years after C#, and Eclipse for Java projects. When JetBrains
| came along it really shined.
|
| I tried VS Code a couple of years ago for a few months for some
| scripting languages, it really is not bad, however JB IDEs are
| better for Java, Python, Ruby,.. even for frontend development
| - support for Angular and React is great.
|
| I bought the "all products pack" for individuals - it something
| like 15 bucks per month - for me it would be silly not to use
| it.
| spullara wrote:
| Recently spent a few months going deep on React development
| and I concur. The support for it was just magical.
| passthejoe wrote:
| This is a decent investment for coders. Good tools make all
| the difference.
| ci5er wrote:
| I pay (personally) for the entire Jetbrains tool set. They are
| damn good. And I guess to be fair, I haven't given a lot of
| time to VSCode, but TBH: I find that Sublime and IntelliJ cover
| the spectrum for me (which is Scala, Java, Kotlin, Python, C,
| Go and Typescript all with git support)
|
| I'm not super exploratory, because it always seems that I have
| a project due in two weeks, but given that I have pickd up two
| of the BEAM languages, but am always lagging on learning Ruby
| and Haskell. These days - I'm starting to wonder about the
| utility of learning another language, other than re-learning
| Smalltalk out of nostalgia.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Critique of the post: The belief that LSP are implemented in the
| compiler is mostly plain wrong. They might or might not be
| maintained by the same team as the language team but are almost
| always a separate library that interface through the compiler
| through APIs. Yes compiler have became much more queryable.
|
| Intellij has had a technology similar to LSP (and much more
| complete) a decade before it's "invention" and do leverage
| compiler APIs. Which btw allow intellij to support LSP
| (apparently) https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/10209-lsp-
| support
|
| The only point here is: Vscode has better and earlier support for
| niche technologies This does not at all outweight the tremendous
| gap between vscode support for non-niche technologies versus the
| excellence of intellij support of non-niche technologies, it's
| two different worlds comparing them is proof of pure ignorance.
|
| The point on code with Me is nonsensical, vscode (and atom before
| through teletype) supported real time pair programming before,
| jetbrains is here playing catch-up (for once)
|
| However the point on Electron enabling better rendering
| performance is actually true, skia is just the fastest 2D
| renderer to exists and it's time for people to understand that
| objectively on this aspect native gui toolkits are obscolete.
| This is why JetBrains has made skia bindings for Java and develop
| jetpack compose for desktop which Wil enable them to reuse the
| chromium rendering engine (skia) for Intellij IDEs while allowing
| their frontend to be in jvm languages (which are multiple time
| faster than js) However I believe that skia alone isn't enough
| and a lot of engineering effort must be made to match the
| chromium rendering performance (cf the various flutter
| performance issues(yes Ionic has faster rendering))
|
| One must understand that adding more features does not equal
| making intellij slower, given enough engineering resources.
| Actually intellij IDEs are quite fast nowadays and it improve
| regularly.
|
| Regarding the github.com argument for Microsoft: It's simple,
| intellij has perfect support for github, you can create pull
| request from the IDE and the only remaining improvements to make
| should not make a huge difference.
| GrayShade wrote:
| > Actually intellij IDEs are quite fast nowadays and it improve
| regularly.
|
| I want what you're having.
|
| I've been actually trying DataGrip these past weeks and even
| though I only used it lightly and I'm on a pretty decent
| computer, it's terribly sluggish. Is there a magic option to
| make it run faster?
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Don't know about datagrip, I was speaking for Idea and
| webstorm anyway they are mostly the same codebase.
|
| You can increase the available ram to intellij in the
| settings (under the help section if I remember correctly) My
| old thinkpad was really slow with Idea because my RAM would
| easily overflow and therefore spam swap usage. The secret
| sauce is to go for 16GB of ram, any developer deserve it.
|
| Also if you feel adventurous, by going to the EAP release
| channel you will get optimization earlier (at the cost of
| some rare additional bugs) Also always be up to date by using
| the jetbrains Toolbox and checking download update
| automatically.
|
| If you turn mitigation=off on your Linux you will get better
| perf in general at the price of enabling an extremely hard
| and slow security threat.
| GrayShade wrote:
| I already happen to run an EAP and Linux without
| mitigations (they're less bad on AMD CPUs anyway). I guess
| I'll try increasing the heap, but I hope it doesn't need 16
| GB for itself.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| I have allocated 4GB for the idea maximum heap size for
| reference
| GrayShade wrote:
| Thanks. It seems that mine defaulted to 2 GB.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I'm very much in the same boat. VS Code isn't the fastest
| editor around, but it still runs without putting up a fight
| on my older machines. I even used it on my x201 from more
| than a decade ago, which happily darts around VS Code while
| PyCharm feels really sluggish.
| jyounker wrote:
| > Meanwhile, JetBrains seems to be staying afloat mostly thanks
| to hard work and sheer luck.
|
| I don't think they keep ahead simply by hard work and sheer luck.
| Once you look under the hood at Intellij it's clear that they
| have significant architectural advantages.
|
| While VS Code is a text editor that uses LSPs to provide
| refactoring and navigation, Intellij is a refactoring engine with
| a good text editor on the front. Under the hood Intellij is a
| structured editor operating on abstract syntax trees. ("psi
| nodes" in Jetbrain's parlance.)
|
| The hard part of creating an LSP is providing things like
| refactoring and navigation support, and these are exactly the
| things that IntelliJ provides for its language plugins. To
| achieve a given level of refactoring and navigation support an
| LSP developer needs to expend significantly more effort than a
| jetbrains plugin developer.
|
| From my vantage point Jetbains doesn't seem to be staying ahead
| by hard work and luck as much as by an intelligent architecture
| and design that allows them to produce high-level, high-value
| features with less effort.
|
| [ It's worth looking at IntelliJ's plugin SDK.
| https://plugins.jetbrains.com/docs/intellij/psi.html ]
| synergy20 wrote:
| I spent nearly 1 year with VS code before paying for Jetbrains
| for good. The time I wasted with VS Code and all its
| configurations from different plugins in json format can't
| justify the time I lost with IDEs.
|
| Not to mention, Pycharm, PHPStorm, GoLand, Clion,Webstorm etc all
| have consistent UI and shortcuts. You learn one and it's quick to
| pick other ones.
|
| Yes I still use vim for console coding sometimes, but Jetbrains
| is where I got most of my productivity these days.
| mkrishnan wrote:
| My opinion: JetBrains IDEs beat every single other IDE/editor
| hands down (Visual Studio -- not Code -- comes close). The level
| of integration and polish is unmatched. I happily paid for
| license and it's been a well spent investment.
| st3fan wrote:
| > Meanwhile, JetBrains seems to be staying afloat mostly thanks
| to hard work and sheer luck.
|
| Or, just maybe, their products are excellent.
|
| This piece is interesting but is is not more than an opinion
| piece. There is very little in there that actually compares the
| two products. Feature-wise or how the developer experience is.
|
| It would be interesting to read an objective comparison. Does any
| site/magazine review developer products?
| hpen wrote:
| VS Code is overrated
| varispeed wrote:
| I hate to work with JetBrain tools. Whatever machine I am using
| them on, they feel sluggish and bloated. Starting an editor takes
| ages and often it is unresponsive or you can feel the delay
| between character appearing on the screen and your key press.
| Absolutely dreadful. That being said I still use them, because
| nothing can quite compare despite these awful flaws. I also use
| VS Code but only because there is almost no delay between typing
| `code .` and having an editor ready to type stuff in. It's
| perfect for quick "sketches" or if you want to check an odd file
| here and there, but if you want to work on a larger code base,
| the experience falls short (e.g. navigation between files,
| searching) With that in mind, there is still a big gaping market
| hole when it comes to IDEs - create an editor with JetBrains
| feature set plus make it as fast as VS Code or Sublime and you'll
| be a winner. One more thing I cannot understand is that literally
| every editor's search functionality is more or less useless for
| bigger projects - simple thing like "and" and "or" operators for
| keywords are yet to be found. Sure some allows you to use regexp,
| but that is a pain and not how people are used to searching when
| using e.g. google or github.
| [deleted]
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Whether accurate or not, my personal perception of IDEA vs. Code
| is that IDEA wants to own my development workspace while Code
| just works with whatever files I've decided to check in.
|
| It's a real shock when I occasionally try an IntelliJ product and
| it just swallows up my entire project repo and injects lots of
| magic.
|
| There's absolutely pros and cons to both. And I don't see them as
| competing for the same class of editor.
|
| I guess it's kind of IDE vs. Text editor. Though Code certainly
| looks more like an IDE every month.
| stewbrew wrote:
| 404?
|
| Not having read the article, I think the main difference is that
| IDEA as a traditional IDE is a monolith, while VSCode
| interestingly and somewhat unexpectedly integrates a lot of
| different tools. With LSP, the VSCode team created something
| quite interesting. And the most interesting aspect is that an LSP
| server can be accessed from many other editors. I personally have
| grown to like VSCode. While I previously switched between eclipse
| and vim, I now use mostly VSCode, RStudio (which I still prefer
| for R code due to some details), and VIM, mostly for maintaining
| todo lists and my markdown wiki.
| webstrand wrote:
| Found it here: https://archive.vn/nNdT1
| tlb wrote:
| Temporarily updated the main URL to this. Original was https:
| //gist.github.com/rambingthoughts/c28fc8caa07733443c77... .
| Thanks
| jjjeii3 wrote:
| Why are desktop Java apps are always so slow? Applications
| written in other languages (C#, C++, etc.) are much much faster.
| Even VS Code, written in JavaScript is faster... I tried hundreds
| of applications and this was always the case and not just with
| certain applications.
| speedgoose wrote:
| It's not really Java as a programming langage, you can have
| light and fast Java code, nor the JVM, it's a pretty fast
| virtual machine that is just very memory hungry by default. In
| my opinion it's the community and the philosophy around Java.
| It's usually a bit over engineered and performances are not
| taken into account very often. Take eclipse as an example, from
| a software design point of view it's great and a very advanced.
| You can for example play with the eclipse modeling framework
| and it's in another league compared to VS code plug-ins.
|
| However the end user doesn't really care about the beauty of
| the Eclipse meta meta model and think more about why it takes
| so long to start or why it uses to much memory compared to
| notepad++.
|
| Also while Vscode is written in typescript/javascript, it uses
| V8 for the javascript VM which is very fast.
| ex3ndr wrote:
| Web Browsers are built on multithreaded rendering - Paint,
| Layout and Main threads. It works really well, but on legacy or
| native everything is done on the single main thread and
| everything is jammed into 16ms of a single thread.
|
| For example why iOS is so fast? It renders everything in
| separate process. (This is why Flutter will always be a garbage
| by reimplementing this in main thread).
|
| I bet it just too much and too old to rewrite to new shiny
| things.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| My best analogy for this is to think of Java as like a truck
| and other languages as like vans (C++) or motor scooters
| (python, etc). Past a critical threshold Java has absolutely
| amazing performance (sits in same league as C/C++) but if you
| imagine driving a large truck around town ... you are
| constantly starting and stopping, turning into alley ways etc -
| a truck is not going to do too well. But if you actually have
| to deliver 50 tons of goods, good luck on the scooter. And a
| well designed Java app can behave like a scooter but its not
| the default setting because most people in enterprise settings
| have truck-like problems.
|
| However the slowness of Java on the desktop is a bit overblown
| by people's past experience I think .... improvements to
| garbage collection and hotspot optimisation, and elimination of
| applets have certainly made a big difference to the type of
| stalls that used to make people say these things.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| I don't believe that there's anything preventing VS Code from
| getting features like refactoring at the level of JetBrains at a
| fundamental level. One time I wrote an IntelliJ plugin that
| exposes an LSP server so Emacs could run Jetbrains' refactorings
| remotely, as a glimpse into such an ideal.
|
| And at a philosophical level, I would imagine that having those
| IDE features in VS Code at Jetbrains' level of polish would be
| viewed as beneficial to everyone involved.
|
| The issue is that on one hand you have an entire salaried dev
| organization whose sole purpose is to create the best IDE
| possible, and on the other you have a scattered array of open
| source devs who only work on the polish as much as they have free
| time. LSP simply came too late to the party. Everything we like
| about IntelliJ is now both battle-tested from thousands of man-
| hours of development and also impractical to architect as a
| separate language server. The more people that use a hypothetical
| JetBrains-developed language server, the less editor market share
| they retain.
|
| Another hypothesis I have is that since some language servers are
| supported officially by the people who develop the language
| itself, their time becomes split between working on the language
| and maintaining the LSP support. Any extra time spent on one
| separate project takes away from the other.
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