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Comment by gelasio | Hacker News Reader

I've tried all of JetBrains tools over and over throughout the years since I keep hearing about how much some people like their stuff - but every single time I am disappointed at how over-engineered everything they do seems to be. Furthermore, their cross platform tools like IntelliJ IDEA always wreak of badly emulated native components that don't look or behave the way that they should on any OS.

So for me - Visual Studio 2015 is the best tool I've ever used for HTML/CSS/JS (and Node.js and C#). It simply outshines everything else I've tried. I guess if I was forced to use an OS X or Linux desktop, I'd resign myself to using JetBrains tools because they probably are the best thing you can find outside of Windows...but as someone who prefers Windows and who wants native Windows apps that behave idiomatically instead of just fulfilling the lowest common denominator - VS can't be beat IMO.

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I've had literally the opposite experience. Everything I seemed to need, IntelliJ IDEA magically had. I just ended up uninstalling things like pgAdmin, for example, since IntelliJ IDEA is just far superior at doing the same thing, and it's just right there where you code. Convenient. Usually it started out as, "I wonder if it can..." and then quickly find the feature that just does what I want.

Even as a Windows user myself, I can't quite articulate what has always bothered me about Visual Studio in general over the years. It seems to have it's own language, terminology, and way of doing things that you have to buy into. And I really don't like that. Let me pick a folder, have that be my project, and edit text really clever like. That's what I want.

like pgAdmin, for example, since IntelliJ IDEA is just far superior at doing the same thing, and it's just right there where you code.

You don't mention the two things together, but VS has the server explorer which you can use to hook in to a database and do administrative tasks (both design and data viewing)

Also pgAdmin is about as feature-ful as Notepad is so it's not hard to do something a little better.

Besides server explorer, VS also has SSDT (SQL Server Data Tools) obviously only for SQL Server, but I've never seen anything even in the same league as SSDT for any open source database.

Take a look at Visual Studio Code. I too have this (probably unfounded) resistance to using full blown Visual Studio for projects outside of work, but have found Code pretty good for developing Javascript and HTML etc. Nice and light, pick a directory as a project, good GIT integration, reasonable text editor, built in debugger etc.

For me it's a good balance between a straight up text editor and full IDE.

What you call over engineered I call common sense capabilities that get out of my way. There isn't any thing (non platform specific) that I can do in VS that I can't do better and faster in the IDEA platform. And with the tooling consistency, in can jump between stacks and Stillman maintain the same functionality.

"What you call over engineered I call common sense capabilities that get out of my way."

I should have just copy & pasted your comment.

this is a very interesting debate is there a list of features side by side? or a comparative study that lists pros and cons? I do not think over-engineering is a subjective term, also common sense :) yes, between them there's lots of levels but one is at one extreme and one is at the other. so I guess, a good analysis of these two IDEs could be make with a good level of objectivity from the author.

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