Hacker News Reader

Comment by cyral | Hacker News Reader

One thing to note is that you can use IntelliJ and install the official plugins for each language. For example you can bring the WebStorm functionality to IntelliJ, or install the database plugin to get an embedded Datagrip window. (Which is really neat because you can then get SQL syntax highlighting and such based on your actual DB)

View on HN

Well just note that this doesn't work with all combination of languages. Try installing CLion on webstorm for example.

IntelliJ ultimate is the main IDE. Everything else is a version of IntelliJ that has been configured for a specific language. IntelliJ should, theoretically, be able to behave like any of the sub-IDEs, but the reverse is not true.

Theoretically yes. In practice no. Each IDE has workflows and features tuned to their respective domain.

They're not just simple configuration changes from each other

The simplified setup for modules in the language-specific IDEs alone makes them worth it IMO. It’s great that the plugins in IntelliJ cover basically everything but CLion, AppCode and Rider - but if I’m working on Python, JavaScript, PHP or doing database work I’ll still fire up Pycharm, WebStorm, PHPStorm and DataGrip respectively because there’s less overhead getting my project imported (and DataGrip is more useful as a standalone DBA tool because I open it and all of my connections are right there).

Given the individual license cost difference between IntelliJ Ultimate and the All Products Pack is minimal it’s worth it, especially given it’s cheaper than IntelliJ + CLion separately.

Even just using the correct language terms is helpful. IntelliJ modules contain packages, because that's how Java works, which makes it super confusing when your modules are python packages and its subunit (called package in the UI) is a python module.

Yeah by the time you need two IDEs you might as well just get the suite.

It also worked out well for me because I bought Ultimate on sale, and the suite was discounted for existing owners. So it's really been good savings. Regardless, given the time savings the IDEs give me, they pay themselves off pretty quickly.

As much as that is true, I have a license for all of them and always use a few of them instead of the main IDE: CLion, Goland and Rider being the ones that are really much better for their respective domains because they are so different.

How does the open source IDEA plus php plugin experience compare to phpstorm?

The plugins for alternative languages (PHP, Python) are available only for IntelliJ Ultimate / paid. It's not available in free / open source IntelliJ

So either [1] you buy IntelliJ Ultimate & get Java + other languages (PHP, Python, Ruby, etc except .NET and C++)

or [2] you buy the language specific IDE (cheaper) like PhpStorm, PyCharm, etc

That didn’t used to be the case. You used to be able to add the Python plugin to the free IDEA ide and that would give you java + pycharm - but only the free tier features of pycharm.

However, if you used the paid IDEA, adding the Python plugin gave you full PyCharm capabilities EXCEPT that IDEA was always based on version N of the core IDE platform where PyCharm was based on N+1 version, i.e. the smaller pycharm IDE sometimes had some newer platform features than the IDEA ide which led to occasional differences between IDEA + Python plugin vs PyCharm.

I switched to VSCode last year and let my licence lapse for Intellij so things may have changed.

What i will say, despite having moved to VSCode and being entirely happy - Intellij is the better platform. It’s the difference between 80% and 99% though, and the VSCode 80% is good enough. If i went back to full time dev, i would buy another jetbrains licence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com