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Comment by hhariri | Hacker News Reader

That's actually not correct. The functionality of all IDE's we have (with exception of AppCode and CLion) can be obtained via plugins on IntelliJ IDEA.

The smaller IDE's are focused around the specific platform / functionality.

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In theory yes, in practice on a project that uses both PHP and Python I find that having phpstorm and pycharm open on different parts still feels better than having intellij w/ plugins, I have the "full" package so I gave it a try.

That said I'm still really happy to have intellij available as well for other stuff so I don't mind that much :)

EDIT: Just tried again with 15.0.2 and the PHP and Pycharm plugins and actually it seems way better than it did, setting up various framework specific bits actually worked.

Nice!.

Sorry hari, I love intellij and the work you do there, but I do not believe you. Please show me an IntelliJ IDEA that looks and behaves exactly like webstorm and pycharm just with plugins. You can't. For example Pycharm doesn't even have a project settings option. What plugin gives you that?

Are you asking if IntelliJ IDEA can look like PyCharm? If that's the case, no, it can't. Each IDE is somewhat tailored to the specifics of the framework/language/platform as I mentioned, but the functionality that they provide is available as plugins. For instance with WebStorm you can have node.js, angular.js plugins installed in IntelliJ IDEA and get the same features.

Obviously, IntelliJ IDEA is a polyglot environment so certain things cater to the needs of many platforms and languages, which is why there are some differences in UI, but AFAIK, the core functionality is there.

Having said that, we fully understand that users want to have smaller more focused IDE's based on the specific needs, which is one of the main reasons we started offer the All Products option.

But I do want to stress that the functionality of the different IDE's are via plugins, and that these plugins are available for IntelliJ IDEA, the same day the IDE's are released.

Sure, and the UI differences become a big problem though when you want to set something up and cannot find the available documentation for intellij IDEA. The instructions will only be for Pycharm and making the translation of where to find the resource in Pycharm to how to find it in IntelliJ via the plugin can be considerably challening. In addition the special editors also seem to have sane default options added in places. I don't have a specific example, but I remember having trouble setting up a django project in intellij, giving up and buying Pycharm and doing it that way.

I'm very happy for the universal license, thank you so much for adding it. I love the special editors like WebStorm and PyCharm, and I use IntelliJ IDEA as well. I use them all, regularly.

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