This doesn’t paper over deprecating the Rust plugin and stealing contributions. I used to be a huge JetBrains fan and now I pull this out every time. Anything but.
It looks like they deprecated that one so they can sell the Rust plug-in for CLion. Granted RustRover is free for non-commercial use.
Stuff like this is why I don’t mess with paid IDEs and editors.
I don’t mind paying for tools that help me do my job. For several years I even had a personal licence for “all products pack” thing. Their IDEs do a decent job.
There are better tools for specific things, but overall as an IDE, it’s pretty good and makes you effective. And especially if you have to use Windows, it’s integrating enough tools that you don’t have to mess with the Windows crappy tooling that often.
That said, it’s still a big fat slow IDE. For a while now I’ve been using neovim my modernized Linux toolkit and for the most part, I’m happier with it then I was with IntelliJ and Goland and the rest. Happier enough to not having a licence for JetBrains any more.
And recently I’ve looked into Zed. Zed looks pretty neat so far, but it’s still under development. Once things stabilise there, I might commit to it and switch full time to Zed. It’s got a few nice things that I miss from IntelliJ, but it’s way, way more responsive.
Back on topic: I wanted to say I don’t mind paying for IDEs, if they’re good tools. But this is more of an ideological challenge and I’m always trying to keep myself from overreacting. So while I don’t agree with you in general (“don’t trust paid IDEs”), I might agree with you specifically (“don’t fall for JetBrains’ lure and Microsoft-like tactics”).
Tbh rust-analyzer is still pretty great. What bothers me more is that Kotlin is pretty much the only language without an official language server, because it doesn’t align with their business interests…
And now the IntelliJ plugin isn’t included in the all products pack for some reason.
Edit: It looks like it actually is included, or is supposed to be.
Oh my God. That’s awful.
Thanks for posting about jet brains coopting and closing the rust plug-in. Yuck!
Don’t need to go all the way there. I always heard that jetbrains make the best editors. Yet when my job forced everyone to use CLion I saw that it was just a lie. The editors aren’t good, they are just expensive.
There are 2 easy examples:
-
Remote developing sucks. Loading a remote cmake project takes ages. Yet if you remove the temp directory it’s almost instantaneous. Except when you do it too often and clion refuses to sync the files, then you’re fucked because there isn’t a “sync” button, it only happens automatically.
-
The commit log is awful. It doesn’t by default show you the commit/branch you’ve checked out, it shows the chronologically most recent commit. There’s no “go to checked out commit” button either, you have to write the hash in the search field. Which btw the search is trash. If you write 6 of the characters of the hash it shows “there are no results”, yet when you write the 7th, suddenly your commit appears.
Your comment feels half-baked at best. You start to talk about “best editors” but you proceed to present your two best examples and neither has anything remotely related to editors.
CLion is undoubtedly the absolute best IDE for C++ projects, and it’s multiplatform on top of it. It’s not even a competition, specially if you’re using CMake. Using Git integration as your best and single example to refute this is extremely puzzling by how silly it is.
Editor/IDE, whatever. People claim both about jetbrains.
If you want a purely editor-thing:
Whatever vscode does with Ctrl+D (I don’t know the name). Ctrl+D is probably the hotkey I use most in vscode (probably more than Ctrl+S), yet CLion doesn’t have that. I’ve searched multiple times the whole settings for it.
Those two examples are just the ones that most recently occurred to me, it has a lot more issues. For example the lack of a staging area. You can’t “git stage” in CLion.
And I don’t think that the git integration is free from criticism. Git integration is one of the most important features of IDEs. It’s absolutely valid to criticize it.
The autoformatter also doesn’t work correctly when developing in remote. Which means that unless I want my PRs to have thousands of lines of whitespace changes, I can’t use the auto formatter.
Now I don’t know if this is a CMake issue or CLion. But at one point It was "#include"ing a struct from a header file I had deleted 1 hour previous to the build failing. The only way to fix that was to create the file again and delete it again.
These complaints might seem small. But put together they are hours of wasted time that you don’t expect from the “best” of something.
JetBrains git integration is a known mess, true.
I’m a big fan of jetbrains, I think they make awesome product and they’re great with the community. That being said, CLion sucks. If I code in C (which isn’t often), I just use VsCode. It’s much better. IntelliJ, Webstorm and PyCharm are great products though.
-
VSCode & VSCodium are also free for commercial use.
Why learn an IDE you won’t use anywhere else?
C# Devkit will do in a pinch but it’s still second class in VS Code compared to languages like TypeScript.
Since MS killed off MonoDevelop and Visual Studio is Windows only, it’ll be good to finally have a free proper C# IDE again on Linux.
I am kind of using intellij ideas for everything. They are just so much better.
I don’t think I would want to work for an employer that is too cheap for an IDE license
It’s not about cheapness, it’s about consistency.
You wanna set up different dev environments and process for every single language you or someone from your team might use? Oh we need documentation and a license for IDEA when we’re doing Java work, and PyCharm when we’re doing Python work, and WebStorm when we’re doing JavaScript work, or we just all use VSCode for everything.
I’ve worked on Java teams, Python Teams, JavaScript Teams, C# teams, and quite frankly, I’ve seen no major benefit to a dedicated IDE for that language vs just configuring VSCode plugins and CLI scripts.
We just have the ultimate license and can use all of the intellij IDEs, but you also can do everything with IDEA and some plugins. And I’m that car you still have the experience of a real IDE and not just a code editor.
Lol “real IDE”. Name the actual day to day feature(s) that makes it “real”. Just saying “you use a little bitch IDE, i use a real IDE” is not an argument.
Much better integrated refactoring support. Much better source code integration support. Much better integrated debugging support. Much better integrated assistive (but not ai) support.
Vscode can do many things IntelliJ can, but not all, and many of them require fiddling with plugins.
Usually, JB is also faster (if your dev machine can run it, but in my experience most devs have beefy machines).
Not my experience. I’ve had the displeasure of having to use Rider at work, and it’s much slower than VSCode, if only for boot times which are a pain in the butt for large projects. You gotta pay for that bloat and feature creep somehow.
And that’s on a Xeon machine.
As for refactoring, yes, Rider has lots of options that don’t work and do half the job. So much so, that I don’t use them at all, because they’re unreliable.
The requirement for Copilot to qualify an IDE is a bit funny. First, VSCode has some support for it, and, secondly, this is super recent, so unless IDEs didn’t exist since last year, I’d say this is not core to the definition of IDE.
They’re really not. As much as I hate commercial licensing for any dev tools, if you want to talk about superior there’s nothing quite as good as Visual Studio (not code) on Windows.
Sounds like a discussion about if someone likes apples or pears
They’re really not. As much as I hate commercial licensing for any dev tools, if you want to talk about superior there’s nothing quite as good as Visual Studio (not code) on Windows.
It really depends on what kind of project you’re working on. For .NET projects that might be true, but for other languages such as anything involving C++ then Visual Studio lags way behind CLion, which is multiplatform to boot.
I adore Visual Studio for how it set the gold standard for code editing. VsCode is growing rapidly, but Visual Studio set an incredibly high bar.
For anyone reading along, Visual Studio Community Edition was free and fantastic last time I tried it, and it does 99% of anything any individual developer cares about.
The paid professional license shines for big messy enterprise stuff, but most people looking for an editor don’t need to worry about that.
All that said, disclaimer for full honesty: my tool of choice is NeoVim - often with a splash of VSCodium.
I don’t actually use VS either mostly because I prefer to use a lighter editor and the commandline. But it does set a high bar for what an IDE should be.
That’s just your opinion, and your specific use case. I do not enjoy using Visual Studio, and MS no longer makes it for the Mac (the superior developer platform (see what I did there?)). JetBrains products have their weaknesses but they are damn good.
Visual Studio for Mac was never the real Visual Studio it was a reskin of Xamarin Studio.
Ok. Thanks for the info I guess. I don’t like Visual Studio on Windows. I use it for work and it’s not better than Rider or any of the JetBrains ides.
Jetbrains licenses are like £100 a year. What commercial project isn’t able to cover that cost.
I’m just hopping the price won’t rise in return.
Yet I’m not going back to eclipse.
They give incremental discounts each time you renew so even if the price increases you’ll probably find you’re spending less each time.
I’ve been on the lower price forever as I had a licence from before the switch.
It’s already expensive. And having a comercial option that is affordable for normal people rather than $$$ entreprise would be good. Quitte a few paying of their own because their entreprise won’t.
I would expect it to rise. I still think it’s worth it, if it’s a good tool for you. IntelliJ is really a good product, even if they do have their downsides. In a commercial environment, it’s totally worth it to buy a licence per developer, if it makes them more productive.
There’s also Zed. It’s still pretty new and barebones but I like it a lot more than Code or anything else.
same here, i was using RustRover before that and it was slow on my laptop, i also had to create an account to use it. Zed is pretty much plug n play
Zed is also lightspeed fast compared to either vscode or JetBrains’ stuff.
Why would you use a library or framework when you can code everything from scratch? It probably depends on how good the VSCode extension is vs how bad the IDE is.
For the languages I have tried (mostly GoLang plus a bit of Terraform/Terragrunt), VSCode plugins can do code highlighting, can highlight syntax and lint errors, can navigate to a methods implementation, the auto-complete seems to pick random words from the code base, and can find the callers for a method. It is good enough for every day use.
IDEs I have used (Eclipse for Java, PyCharm, InteliJ for Kotlin) offer more. They all have starter templates for common file types. The auto-complete is much more syntax aware and can sometimes guess what variables I intend to pass in as arguments. There is refactoring which can correctly find other usages of a variable and can make trivial code rewrites. There are generators for boilerplate methods. They all have a built in graphical debugger and a test runner.
This is great. Rider pretty much carried me through my first year at uni, considering that visual studio does not work on Linux. The neovim plugin for C# that I used kept crashing for me, glad to see non students also getting a chance to try out this software.
I suspect this is because of the looming end of Windows 10. There’s a large segment of Windows users, myself included, with Visual Studio being the only remaining tie to the Windows ecosystem. Extremely smart move by JetBrains, if true.
I am yet to meet someone who doesn’t use VSCode for web development.
I know plenty of people that use vim/neovim for web development. I am also one of them
Woah, that’s pretty cool! i installed an extension for vim keybindings inside VS Code recently, as I find them very powerful. Unfortunately, I rely on VSC’s plugin ecosystem and thus can’t fully switch over to neovim, but I’ve liked it so far for everything else I do on my system, like writing bash scripts.
If you’re feeling bold, check out the NeoVim VSCode plugin. It’s delightful.
It’s essentially the VSCode remote plugin, but connecting to the NeoVim back-end.
It gives all the functionality of NeoVim along with all the functionality of VSCode.
Also, annecdotaly, it’s substantially faster than the VSVim plugin.
I’ve had issues with that one because I’m using VS Codium flatpak. I’ve exposed system binaries and the extension found the nvim binary, yet it kept erroring out with the message that Nvim was disconnected. VSVim is better in that regard for my case, because it is a stand-alone extension.
I saw an error like that, too. (Also with the flatpak.)
I want to say I had an error in my
init.vimthat was the underlying cause, and the error message cleared up once I had that fixed. I also had to make sure both executables were on my path, and I had to correct where the NeoVim plugin was looking for Nvim, as well, in settings.json.I didn’t have any errors in the
init.vimfile because I didn’t have any. I added an exampleinit.luafile with contents from here and configured the extension to pull this config file, yet it still says Nvim disconnected each time I restart it. I just gave up and resorted to VSVimThat makes sense. Did you also set the path to Nvim in settings.json? I had to do so to clear at least one error.
I also sometimes get that “disconnected” error too, but the have it work fine. I think there’s a race condition and it raises the error right after it starts, but then connects anyway, once everything else is set.
You’ve never met an average ASP.NET developer?
You’ve never met an average ASP.NET developer?
OP is right. For web development with JavaScript frameworks (React, Angular, etc) with Node and even Typescript, you either use vscode or you haven’t discovered vscode yet.
Or meet old ideological dogs like me :P
