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Comment by jlelse | Hacker News Reader

I recently switched from IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate to VS Code for Go development (side project), because I don't want to pay for it, when I'm no longer a student. With Golang VS Code works great after getting used to it. The Go plugin is not available for the community edition. For Java and Android development I always used (and still use) IDEA because it's feels much better than Eclipse.

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If you plan to be a professional software engineer, then I recommend just paying for the best tools. The price of one hour of an engineer's salary (give or take) can pay for the entire IntelliJ suite for a year.

Sheesh, I wish I was worth $500/hr. I guess I'm not professional enough.

IntelliJ is $149 for a personal license.

That's still more like a couple of hours :)

That's for the full suite, too. Pycharm covers a lot of web dev beyond python and personal is only $89 first year, $71 second and $53 third.

And you don't need to continue your subscription unless you want continued updates. My PyCharm 'subscription' lapsed around two years ago, and I'm only planning on purchasing a new fallback license for the upcoming 2020.3 release because their excellent vim-mode plugin finally supports jump lists, but requires a newer version than the one I originally paid for - and I'm honestly happy to pay them again.

And you will love the new version! So much changed these last too years.

And they allow one to use the personal license at work, so long as no one at home is simultaneously using that license (I'm paraphrasing, and also cognizant that "at work" and "at home" now mean something radically different than this time last year) : https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240855-Can-... (going up one level has all kind of interesting other licensing FAQs)

I actually still do that even though work bought me an IJ license because my personal _suite_ license covers more tools

Same. I like using the tools for any personal projects, and it's worth the price for the individual use subscription.

"All Products Pack" for individuals is $250/yr, first year, dropping to $200 for year 2 and $150 for year 3+.

Still quite a lot more than I make in an hour, but definitely not $500. Are you looking at the organization pricing?

The definition of "best" is often subjective and may boil down to familiarity.

On the other hand, betting on open-source tooling may be a good way to increase the chances that your "best" tools will still be available in the future.

give or take 14 hours for me!

For work I currently have to use an old Eclipse version in a slow virtual desktop infrastructure. But yeah I know it's worth paying for good tools.

VS Code for Go is really good, your move makes total sense.

I was a happy VS Code user (after being a happy VIM user for a while) until I switched jobs from Go codebase to Ruby and then I quickly jumped back to IntelliJ. So far (for me) this is the only editor that correctly figures out most of the definitions and locations of methods/classes/etc.

Intellij IDEA is my go-to tool when working with the dynamic beast Ruby.

Well, actually Intellij IDEA is my overall go-to tool, also now when I work with Go again mostly.

You could always just use the early access builds, which are free, and usually don't have any major bugs whatsoever.

While an OK option if you're optimizing only for money spent on tools, I would still say this is not a good idea. There are bugs and depending on your workflow can be pretty dramatic show stoppers. Value your time more, upgrade when you need new features/solving a problem but otherwise I think stability in your tooling is very valuable.

I pay for pycharm and still used EAP releases for a year without encountering stability issues. I turned EAP off only because it kept breaking my plugins.

I went the other way around (from VS Code to IntelliJ), it has some refactoring support and the like, and I have to work and switch between a few languages during an average work day. VS Code is fine for a lot of things, but not as powerful as intellij.

That said, main downside to IntelliJ is IMO speed and input lag in editor windows, mainly in TSX files. I admit it's a complex language and the fact that Prettier runs on save probably isn't helping either, but still. It has trouble resolving imports, some are done automatically, others you have to select a quick fix options for, and sometimes both work and you end up with the import itself getting munged.

Interesting my frustration with VSCode (for typescript) was that everything felt sluggish compared to Idea. I guess that may be something where hardware configuration and organization of project matter?

You should try the redhat java plugin for vscode. You won't even know that you're using eclipse :)

It gets down to $150 a year which I think is a pretty good deal all things considered.

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