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Intellij Ultimate costs me £14 a month, with the plugins (which makes it equivalent to Phpstorm, PyCharm, Rubymine and Webstorm) thats less than I spend on coffee in two weeks, it's insane value however you look at it.

That said I still spend a chunk of time (maybe 30%) in vscode because for somethings I prefer it (it's git support with git lens is incredible) and for TypeScript it's comparable to Intellij with the advantage you can start it, do an edit and close before Intellij has finished re-indexing.

IntelliJ ultimate doesn't include C++ support, though, which is an additional $100 to get the "all products" package. $250 for a fairly basic C++ IDE that insists you use Cmake is not exactly an "insane value" to me, but ymmv.

C++ tooling is fairly abysmal. Partly because the language is so darn complex and full of warts. You basically need to implement most of a compiler to get meaningful IDE features.

Point being, a higher price point for a C++ IDE makes a lot of sense.

> a higher price point for a C++ IDE makes a lot of sense.

Except Eclipse does C++ better than CLion and it's $250 cheaper. The only real advantage JetBrains has here is consistency with their other products, but then they ruined that by putting it in its own standalone product. So you can't have, say, a Python/Java/Kotlin project with a C++ extension library in a single IDE window, at least not if you're invested in JetBrains technology.

Whereas that would work fine in vscode, Eclipse, Atom-IDE probably once it gets a C++ language server plugin which LLVM is working on, etc... Competition is good. IntelliJ is far from complete. That's really all I'm getting at. IntelliJ is not the pinacle, superior end-all-be-all IDE that some were saying here. It maybe is if you're in their primary supported set of languages. But it's not if you're at all on the fringes of what JetBrains supports (not that I'd necessarily call C++ a "fringe", either, but whatever)

The Eclipse indexer seems better. The CLion search tools and non-C++ features (integrated DB utilities, OOP-style refactoring tools, etc.) are certainly better.

C++ has libclang, which is "most of a compiler" and pretty good, so if you can plug libclang into your editor, which most editors like emacs can do, then it's pretty close to an IDE.

The reasoning I've heard why an IDE doesn't do that (as opposed to a beefed-up text editor) is that an IDE needs to continue parsing and analyzing even in the face of an error in your source code. Because, presumably, you still want features like "jump to the definition of FoobarClient" to work even if you've misspelled something in a header included indirectly by FoobarClient.h.

Compilers generally stop after the first set of errors in the first compilation unit. IDE indexers want to keep going as much as possible.

I keep seeing people writing about these "cheap" intellij subscriptions but on the website it's 400 pounds a year.

You're probably looking at the "Businesses and Organizations" pricing, where the org pays £499/yr per user. The personal ("Individual Customers") license is starts at £199, and decreases to £159 then £119 for subsequent years. There's a bunch of groups (e.g. Open Source projects) that qualify for free or heavily discounted licenses too.

And maybe importantly, you can use a personal license at work, on paid projects, etc.

I've never been particularly bullish on Atom or Electron, but I think Jetbrains is going to be eating their lunch for awhile at least.

You have to buy a personal license yourself, your organization cannot pay for it. I just don't want to pay for work tools, my employer should do that and then it is the higher price.

That's fair. Personally, though I could get the business license and expense it, I choose to pay for it as a personal license because I use it personally as well, and I'd be happy to pay the individual license price either way.

I really would like to see this utopian world where all other professions outside IT also get their tools for free.

My grandfather was a master carpenter, he had a saying I've always liked "If you use something for more than an hour a day buy the best you can afford".

I've never minded paying for developer tools as long as I could afford them, lots of professionals spend a lot more than we do on tools/professional development.

Not to mention this whole society which expects everything for free has made it very hard for a small company to get into the market and innovate.

If you think about how much money you can make from a professional tool and how much productivity it gains you then the price should be a no brainier.

Offtopic: I would also urge you if you want to solder not to buy a cheap soldering iron from radioshack, etc. If you don't have the money for a weller or hakko soldering station then at the very least buy a chinese temperature controlled hakko 936 clone. The difference between a crap iron and a decent temperature controlled iron is gigantic.

I used to solder a bunch as a kid, using my dad's Weller gun (which was built like a tank and still worked last I heard, even though it was something like 40 years old). When I bought my own cheap soldering iron "pencil" as an adult for one project, I thought I'd forgotten how to solder. It seemed so hard to get good joints with the cheap iron. The Weller gun wasn't even temperature controlled but it worked. The cheapo pencil iron just didn't get hot enough fast enough to be useful.

Then I bought a mid-range Weller station and things got super easy again. It's about ten years old now and still works fine. It's probably a worthwhile investment, even for rare use. I mean, it's only ~$100 to get a pretty good iron, vs. $20 for garbage.

If I ever could get my lazy butt in gear, I want to make a video to prove that you can solder competently with a cheap and crappy soldering iron.

I have a soldering iron that has to be the cheapest of the cheap, that I've had since 1991; I got it when I went to a local votech electronics school fresh from high school.

It's something like a 35 watt pencil iron, and the tip is janky like nobody's business. You have to wait like 15 minutes for it to heat up. The tip is not in the greatest shape.

But I can tin that puppy up and solder perfectly with it. Now, I'm not saying you could do SMT rework using it, but basic thru-hole is no problem at all. I've assembled tons of things with it over the years.

I also have a couple of older temp controlled irons - and they are great tools as well; honestly, I prefer them over my old iron. But I know, at least for myself, that what iron I use doesn't make a difference in the project, but rather the skills I bring to the table.

As the old saying goes, "a poor craftsman blames his tools"...

Sure, I'm a poor craftsman in this regard; I don't solder enough to ever be good at it. But, really, when you've gotta wait 15 minutes for it to heat up, and then after a few joints you have to wait some more because it cooled off in the process...really, is it a good, or even usable, tool?

I merely found it difficult to use the cheap pencil iron to get good results, because good results required a lot more out of me, mostly in the form of patience waiting for it to get hot. Also, I suspect cheap tools have gotten worse since 1991. I have cheap tools I bought in that era that are higher quality than the same brand/model today.

Nonetheless, it's just good advice to use good tools if you do something often. And, sometimes it's good advice to use good tools even if you don't do it often, but expect to do it again in the future (I find myself working on things that require soldering every couple of years, but expect that'll be true for the rest of my life, so I might as well use a decent iron to do it...it's not like they stop working after being stored for a year).

Except that your grandpa didn't have to pay a monthly subscription for his hammer. I really dislike the subscription model for tools.

How did he feel about perpetually renting them? Even if the tool is currently perfect, I don't trust that the company's future plans will align with my future needs; I expect that they'll diverge.

edit: I stand corrected; didn't see the asterisk and the separate page specifying that an active subscription isn't necessary to continue using the current version of the software.

If you bother looking at the page you'll know when you buy a yearly subscription (or 12 consecutive monthly) with Jet Brains you automatically get a perpetual license for the current version.

You only need to keep paying if you want to keep getting updates. If you're happy with the current version no one is forcing you to keep paying or keep updating.

I can't speak to all IDEs, but at least with IntelliJ you're not just renting it.

They even give you a helpful info-graphic telling you how to minimize subscription cost if you just want to get a perpetual license for a particular version:

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/article_attachments/203545445...

I looked at the page, but didn't read the definition of "perpetual fallback license". Thank you for the clarification.

It still seems bizarre that one standard case is that you pay for a subscription, presumably using version x, and then are pushed down to version x-1 if you didn't subscribe for at least a year under version x.

Thinking about it a bit more yeah, when you stop subscribing you might have to roll back 12 months of updates on your machine, which is pretty odd. Clearly they want to discourage you from doing it.

At least bug fixes are included:

"The license also includes all bugfix updates, more specifically in X.Y.Z version all Z releases are included."

I can understand giving you the major version at the time you bought the subscription but it's a bit stingy to exclude minor version bumps (Y releases).

It's not minor version bump. JetBrains doesn't use semver. X.Y is typically a major release, with X being the year (e.g. 2017.2)

That's an unrealistically forgiving outlook on this.

You're forced to upgrade when the language you're using upgrades. Or the ecosystem around the product evolves. The IDE doesn't live in a vacuum that will work in perpetuity.

It's realistically much closer to renting than buying as once the updates stop it's not that much longer until the product is no longer usable in a modern environment. Simple example would be if you want to use Kotlin 1.1.4 (latest stable) you must be using Intellij 2016.2 or newer to get the corresponding 1.1.4 kotlin plugin. And if you use an older plugin, the IDE will complain at you and things will be buggy and not work right. Similarly since gradle support is built into the IDE at some point that will fail if your IDE is no longer being updated.

It's not realistic to avoid updating the IDE for long. That's why Jetbrains prominently features subscription and yearly renewals - because you're very nearly forced into it.

You can hardly blame them for this situation though. They obviously have to do work to keep the IDE up to date.

That actually happened with IntelliJ - which is one reason why I'm trying to move over to Atom.

It used to be there was a plugin package to allow you to use IntelliJ for C/C++ development, in addition to all the other languages. That changed, though - and they split CLion off the main branch.

So now - if for instance you want to do NodeJS robotics work, and interface to an Arduino (for example), you would need to use regular IntelliJ with the extensions for javascript, and CLion separately for C/C++ development. Essentially dinging you twice for what should be the same damn product.

It wouldn't surprise me in the least to see them split the javascript portion off into its own editor suite as well.

Atom may not be or have everything that IntelliJ does, but because it is open source, and extensible, and not controlled by a singular entity, I know that I don't have to worry about it changing like that in the future.

Don't get me wrong, though - I like IntelliJ, I think it's a great IDE (started out with PHPStorm). But I think it should have stayed general purpose and extensible, and not lock languages out to move people to another (but essentially the same) IDE. I'd have no problem paying the yearly fee - but I'm not going to pay for it twice.

With all subscriptions 1 year or greater, the JetBrains license grants you an eternal, irrevocable license to whatever version was the latest version at the time your subscription expired (look up perpetual fallback license).

I'm not a fan of their license change either, but calling it perpetual rent is just not correct.

Last time I checked it was the FIRST version you could keep forever. I guess they wanted to avoid having people buying a license every other year. I could be mistaken, though.

https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/#edition=personal

119 for Intellij 199 for everything.

I didn't need everything since Intellij with plugins is everything (for the stuff I do).

I don't know where these numbers come from. I just looked it up and my subscription to all IDEs JetBrains had to offer is $149/year. Given how much time I spend in RubyMine and IntelliJ this is a great price. Even if I wouldn't every once in a while use AppCode and DataGrip as well.

My only issue is lack of good Rust support.

For a company, yes. Individual license is much cheaper, but the devs need to pay for it themselves.

Exactly this, work would pay for it but I didn't ask, I already had a personal subscription and I use it at least as much outside of work as I do at work.

I get your pain ... the Verilog Synopsis integration party took about a decade to get over, and at $20K+/seat, it hurt to have to shell out for 2~3 independent-but-each-necessary licenses (as an indie).

But, for JetBrains, at $200/seat/year ... as an Indie making anything more than $150/hour, why would you even worry about it?

EDIT: I'm mostly a vi guy, so I don't really know my ass from a hole in the ground w.r.t. IDEs. It's just ridiculous to me that a professional might complain about a $200 tool being expensive. But, your constraints are not my constraints, so I'm probably being overly judgemental. And, for that, if I am, I am sorry.

Expensive?!?

It is a bargain compared with what I used to pay for programming tools during the 90's.

In other professions people care to buy their tools.

Like when you used to have buy your compilers.

> In other professions people care to buy their tools.

JetBrains' tools have to be rented.

> JetBrains' tools have to be rented.

That's not correct. JetBrains subscriptions come with a perpetual fallback license for the version available when you purchased the subscription. This is basically the same as the previous model where you would buy a license for a specific version with free upgrades for some period of time afterwards. Most people would continuously buy the upgrade license they wanted to stay on the latest version.

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

This isn't accurate. When you now pay for a year long "subscription" you own that version and can use it indefinitely. Exactly like buying a version-license previously.

Relative to the productivity gains from IntelliJ it's well worth the price. It's pretty much the only development tool I gladly pay for.

This is tangential, but the IntelliJ Rust plugin is fantastic, and just got officially supported! (http://intellij-rust.github.io)

If you check the changelog [1] you'll see the rust plugin has been officially support for a little over a year.

1. https://intellij-rust.github.io/thisweek/

I meant "officially supported by JetBrains" (https://intellij-rust.github.io/2017/07/31/changelog-47.html)

Dunno I used to think it was, for businesses. But if you buy your own personal license you're paying a lot less than you would for Visual Studio overall. I was fortunate to have a discount for having had a student license, so I got like 40% off the price tag or something. I paid under $200 for software that allows me to make thousands every year. Not only do you get all those fancy Java IDE's but you get ReSharper and the whole family for Visual Studio. I say it's underpriced, and every year I renew they lower the price, but my license is perpetual the moment I stop renewing for a year. I think if they charged me $300 a year I'd still find it worth it considering all they give me in return. I'm able to be much more productive in not just .NET, but Python, Java, JavaScript, PHP and other languages, and hopefully someday a Rust IDE comes out of their workshop.

I don't remember if IntelliJ Community Edition's license disallows usage of third-party plugins for languages already coered by JetBrains's paid products.

If not, anyone can create e.g. a free and open Python or Ruby IDE inside the familiar IntelliJ IDE experience, e.g. by adopting IDE-like software used in Emacs, Vim, or Sublime.

See also: language servers. I think that the future is "the editor of your choice" + "the language servers you can afford". JetBrains's IDE is already modular, but these modules just happen to run in the same Java process. This limitation of IDE architecture can be overcome, and companies like Microsoft keep pouring efforts into it.