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Comment by nikitaga | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile IntelliJ is rotting with months-old bugs that render entire features useless, with no fixes and no ETAs in sight. The only product that I pay money for that constantly, on almost every release, pains me with new bugs, a good portion of which are never fixed. I thought about using other Jetbrains products like DataGrip (and now this Fleet), but I'm not going to invest even more into a company that simply refuses to fix bugs and regressions.

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IntelliJ IDEA along with the platform is the largest team at JetBrains and we're constantly working on bugs and features. If you can please point me to the issues you're referring to in YouTrack, I can check the status.

Sorry for hijacking this question but I thought this might be a chance to push a bit the attention to some of the bugs I reported, as it would be nice to have them fixed.

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues?q=by:%20albertzeyer%20

I don't want to sound too negative here though. In general, I'm very happy with IntelliJ, and I think it's currently the best available IDE for many languages (I care mostly about Python and PyCharm currently).

Thanks for the support Albert, and for the bug reports. I'll follow-up with the team.

OTOH, just two of the bugs that annoyed me today:

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-256708

  - Regression: Markdown preview vertical sync does not work anymore

  - Makes editing long documentation files a pain, I have to use an external markdown editor now

  - First reported 12 months ago

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-282427

  - Regression: Git actions don't work anymore when looking at the file diff window

  - Breaks my reviewing workflow, I have to use an older version of IntelliJ (which of course has its own problems)

  - First reported 3 months ago

Missing / incomplete features is one thing (hello Scala 3 support), but leaving regressions unfixed for so long is breaking the fundamental trust that users have in your product – the ability to rely on the basic functionality that already exists.

Thanks. Will check.

Not OP and quite satisfied with your products, but I want to take this opportunity to point at this issue for which I really would like to see some progress:

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WEB-48756

This bug is quite telling: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-276949 It is marked as fixed but it is not yet released. If you look inside, you will see that HTTP Proxy authentication has been broken for almost a year. Many corporate users are behind such proxies, and they suffer.

This kind of bugs should be utmost priority, because they directly impact the cashflow.

same to me - sad story every day..

Ouups... it's been reopened after the 2021.3 release.

Another issue that hits IntelliJ IDEA corporate customers is WSL2 support.

While VS Code has great WSL2 support, IntelliJ IDEA can not even show proper error messages when opening Maven projects inside WSL2.

See https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-267333

Seconded, as a pycharm user. It doesn’t support virtualenvs inside WSL2. I mean… no virtualenvs? In a paid python IDE?

There's been a long-standing issue in Rider and also Webstorm where you try to search globally with Ctrl-Shift-F, and the search UI comes up with the searchbar unfocused and pre-filled with something random. You type what you avtually want to search for, and it either goes nowhere, or tacks onto the end of whatever garbage was pre-populated in the search bar.

This sounds like this one: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-201301 It's a third-party issue that we, unfortunately, can't properly address on our side but there's a workaround available.

Nah, it's not that - this is on Windows.

If some text is highlighted, the Ctrl-Shift-F dialog will populate with that text, and it will be focused and selected.

If nothing is highlighted in the editor, then it uses some random bit of text from the search history buffer, and does not focus the input.

People on this issue[1] have been asking themselves the same questions. New very specific features are added with every new releases. However, the Git/shelf experience is lacking the ability to commit specific lines.

[1] See this highly voted issue: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-186988 (opened since more than 3 years already)

That looks like a feature request, not a bug. Am I wrong?

More effective would be to send the board and the CEO links to this and the other thread to show how long-gone the days of "develop with pleasure!" really are.

I think that it would be good to dedicate a few months with no new feature and just focus on fixing all the regression bugs, there's a lot of bugs that are reported for many months to a year seemingly without activity.

I used to like Intellij but got fed up and just stopped using it. Dealing with regression bugs isn't worth it. An IDE should be extremely stable, releasing new features is great but it shouldn't be to the detriment of existing features.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code?

> A score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you’ve got serious problems. The truth is that most software organizations are running with a score of 2 or 3, and they need serious help, because companies like Microsoft run at 12 full-time.

Over the weekend I spent a good chunk of a day fighting with a copy of Windows 11 for ARM preview that has a major bug wherein the Start Menu just straight-up doesn’t work. I’m not sure Microsoft is running at 12 full-time 21 years on from when this article was posted.

I don't think that Microsoft ever ran at 12 full-time given my experience with windows 9x... But then Joel is biased when it comes to Microsoft.

It was also 20 years ago when Microsoft didn't constantly release half finished versions of Windows.

That might indicate a good place to work for a software engineer, but not necessarily a profitable business. If a bug affects 1% of your customers but a feature will potentially bring 2% more customers, the business will obviously prioritise the latter.

Disclaimer: I know that the above is an oversimplification but the point is there has to be a balance between fixing bugs and adding features. You can't wait until all reported bugs have been fixed.

I think that's often the reasoning behind this but I think the oversimplification doesn't help. It's usually harder to attract new customers than to retain them so retention is important and regression bugs affect that. They slowly erode the confidence until the customers who were your major advocates now become strong critics wherever they go.

> I think the oversimplification doesn't help

True

> It's usually harder to attract new customers

To my defense that difficulty was factored in the 2% figure.

oh yes, I didn't mean to harp on you, what I meant is that I believe a lot of executives make the same calculation, oversimplifying things in the same way which leads to the repeated QA issues both Apple and Microsoft have or to the issues that Jetbrains has. New features are exciting and are seen as ways to get new customers.

Stability and bug fixes is not sexy and I believe underestimated as a way to retain customers but it's critical to customer happiness.

I shouldn't have to point out just how broken that is as a way of supporting paying customers.

Like the OP I've simply stopped reporting bugs, because they don't get looked at for literally years, let alone fixed.

The product is OK-ish, the support is abysmal.

It’s funny because I use Rider for work and I did have few issues that I reported but my experience is totally different. I got instant help in every case, usually developer jumping into the thread and people actually fixing bugs.

This is pretty unrelated, but it's bugged me for years and this is the first chance I've had to ask someone who works at Jetbrains, so I'm going to ask anyway: what exactly is going on with the name "IntelliJ IDEA" versus the other IDEs (Pycharm, RubyMine, etc.)? When I first saw it, I assumed that either "IDEA" was a brand of IDEs of which IntelliJ was one, or the reverse, but I was surprised when I saw that the other IDEs from Jetbrains don't use either word for their names. Is there any other IDEA other than IntelliJ? Is anything else "IntelliJ" besides "IDEA"? The best explanation I can come up with is that there was originally an idea (pun intended) to reuse branding across them, but it was abandoned by the time the other IDEs came out, but I have no idea if this even fits the timeline of their releases, let alone if it's accurate.

I was reporting a lot of bugs to them initially, but so many of them were ignored that I can’t force myself to do this anymore.

I’m still paying for IDEA Ultimate, but it's only because I’m waiting for a better IDE with a more fair subscription system (when I cancel the subscription that was at least 1 year long, I should have the LATEST version I’ve paid for, not the first one). I will try Feet, of course, but I have no high hopes nor trust for JB.

Are these on YouTrack? Under same username as here?

Yes. Username is OZ.

I have a subscription to ultimate. Its terms seem quite fair to me - you're effectively buying a specific version (the one you get to keep) and paying for it in instalments over the year. Until your new subscription starts you have not paid for those interim releases. They send conspicuous renewal email notices well ahead of making renewal charges which is more than most recurring subscriptions of all types provide.

So personally I'm willing to extend some trust to IntelliJ.

As a product it's quite pleasant to use. For Java development it strangely lacks quite a few of the nicer features of Eclipse, but its good quality support for so many different languages (e.g. for Rust) compensates for that.

I agree about the Rust plugin :) It's great.

The only language I ever really use IntelliJ for is PHP, and apart from minor issues that usually get fixed within one or two updates it's fantastic. Maybe I got lucky here, or maybe it's because every other IDE for PHP is next to useless, so it's easy for IntelliJ to shine.

There is no better IDE, but it doesn't mean this one is perfect.

I feel the same about Resharper. I stopped using it after many years simply because I could no longer bear the typing latency that is causes. I even bought a new laptop thinking the old hardware was to blame, only to discover the latency has barely improved. I'm now happy with "bare" Visual Studio 2022 - it may have fewer niceties, but I'm so much more productive!

Same for me. I tried "escaping" ReSharper a few times over the years (have used it for 10+ years) - but I kept crawling back after a few days or weeks feeling super handicapped without the features.

I also bought new hardware - and noticed no real improvement (something about a fundamental threading problem, I think).

About 6 months ago I was finally fed up and just accepted I would be slower and less productive in some areas for a while without ReSharper, but that it would be OK.

I still miss features from it on a daily basis, but overall I am now quite happy with vanilla VS2019/22 - and never want to go back to the lag-hell that is ReSharper.

The last feature that made me reinstall ReSharper was smart completion. Although by now IntelliCode seems to be often on par with it (plus some extras like automatically recognizing manual refactorings and offering them as actual refactorings).

As for refactorings and analyses: Roslynator is quite nice, but requires some tweaking which rules you really want enabled because it will otherwise cause lag as well.

Just use Rider.

It's worrying because they're a private company, and part of me thinks this isn't only to capture a new segment of the market, but also a hedge for if/when their IntelliJ users start migrating to these cloud IDEs

The lack of regression fixes is surprising given paying customers are often more enterprise focused

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