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Comment by alangpierce | Hacker News Reader

WebStorm (and everything in the IntelliJ family) also has a really nice debugging experience. Very similar benefits to what you described: it mostly Just Works, at least for my use cases, and you just add breakpoints to where you're already coding rather than needing to do things in a separate window.

That said, with both VSCode and WebStorm, I've seen finicky issues from time to time, like source maps not working right or trouble getting it to work with non-trivial test suites. For example, my company's test suite uses a wrapper CLI that pre-loads certain files and sets environment variables in a specific way, and I need to replicate that configuration manually in order to run tests from WebStorm. I'm certainly excited to see ndb as a "baseline" great experience that everyone can use, regardless of editor.

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Vscode uses chrome remote protocol for both web and Nodejs.

I’m not sure why you’d need to make the huge download of chromium via puppeteer just to use ndb. Sounds over engineered.

Node with —inspect can be directly connected to normal chrome browser. It’s very simple jsonrpc protocol over websockets.

Sadly I find IntelliJ to be the worst editor I've ever seen. Slow, weird shortcuts, graphics problems, focus stealing. The downsides are so bad that it almost negates it's benefits.

Unfortunately, for Salesforce development the alternative is VSCode with subpar plugin (and tons of features blatantly stolen from independent IJ plugin developer)...

IntelliJ & Webstorm are two different IDEs manufactured for two different purposes.

It's the same core editor with different pre-installed plugins, so I think criticisms of any of the JetBrains IDEs often apply to all of them. I have indeed seen slowness (depending on context), graphics issues, and focus issues in WebStorm, PyCharm, and others, but I still like them better than any other editor I've used.

Every language has its own implementation of code intelligence, though, so for different languages you might see significant differences in things like indexing time and the performance and quality of autocomplete.

That was always the core issue with Java for me. No matter how hard they tried to sell me that they finally fixed UI with Swing and whatnot, it always felt like Java apps lived in their own bubble, consumed massive resources and we're slow in general.

The best approach so far is Android and even then, I would say that the big difference between iOS and Android is precisely when the garbage collector kicks in and you get to see a phone with hiccups.

But of course, the Java language itself is loved by the academia as it conforms nicely to everything that is taught in proper architecture (even if it is verbose like no one)

I have no idea where you came up with Java being especially loved by academia? If anything, it’s quite the opposite, especially in the PL community.

It was for a while (and still is to a lesser extent) very common in pedagogy, though this was more a result of industrial popularity than any love from academia.

Java was the rage teaching language in the earlier part of this century, but that isn't really true today. Python is more popular.

Poland evidently lags behind then. Still C/C++ and Java. Got a lot of colleagues stuck in Java after finishing degrees.

Ok I should have said was loved, because that was certainly the case for me. They loved explaining entity objects, factories and others in Java. But I think you are right as far as Python taking over.

I don't understand the downvotes for the comment though, jesus, it's like I insulted somebody's kid by giving my opinion.

Performance can be improved by disabling plugins you don't use, disabling features like code folding, etc. and finally by excluding non-essential files from indexing.

I don't know about the graphics problems but you can disable focus stealing in your window manager. During the first time setup you are given the option of using other keys. For a vim-like experience you can use IdeaVim.

For node, IntelliJ gives you: code completion across files, debugging (local, remote, including Docker), testing (e.g.: automatically recognizes test cases and creates a run configuration from them), code coverage, type inference from JSDoc documentation or flow, linting, version control integration with excellent blame integration, etc.

Wow that was a lot of plug-ins to disable. Took me a while. It's shocking how they left enabled by default.

> disable focus stealing in your window manager

Can you expand more on this. Two issues I have is:

- Launching IntelliJ and another app simultaneously would pop IJ on top. Very indicative of how Windows platform works. Basically not an issue as I launch it like once a month.

- Saving/building something would switch focus to Messages panel. Clicking on item in project view opens a file, but typing still happens on project view panel...

I've actually run into different focus issues, stuff involving WebStorm multiple project windows on Mac and the wrong one getting focus.

For focus within the editor, I've been pretty happy, but it does take a little learning to get a feel for the keyboard shortcuts. Quick rundown on focus, at least on Mac (other platforms/keymaps are mostly similar, I think):

• Cmd+1, Cmd+2, Cmd+3 etc focus and toggle the different panels.

• Wherever you are, Escape gets you back to the code. Shift+Escape closes the focused panel and moves back to the code.

• Option+Tab switches between code panes.

• Whenever you open code from any panel, Enter will open the code and leave focus on the panel, and Cmd+Down will open the code and move focus to the code.

I find it easy enough to switch focus that even if an action ends up in a focus state I don't expect, it's just a little muscle memory to move focus to what I want.

Also, you might also want to disable other forms of indexing for your project, like Windows' indexing or macOS' Spotlight.

wow i have never heard anyone say anything that bad about intellij! their support is actually fantastic. if you find a bug, report it. you'll probably see it fixed asap

I'm not a fan. Webstorm (along with its Intellij cousins) is slow, occasionally buggy, and has a horrid UX. Their subscription-based ransomware was long ago eclipsed by VS Code.

I did not have that experience with IntelliJ. Bugs were everywhere, and during one of their product Beta cycles, they moved from Beta to release without fixing many of the problematic bugs I had reported!

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