Take Part in the New UI Preview for Your JetBrains IDE
blog.jetbrains.com
blog.jetbrains.com
Their IDEs are extremely powerful and provide many useful tools, and hiding them behind meaningless icons or burying them deep in a smaller number of context menus doesn't do any favors for either discoverability or ease of use.
My understanding of simplified UI is that it's meant to be accessible and inclusive to those who have other priorities in life than to spend time learning about the technology and tools they have to use. As a professional developer though, I'm comfortable using computers. It's a core part of the job, and new developers will have to learn this too. It's not helpful to make the UI look prettier by increasing margins (and thus decreasing information density), and it's not helpful to hold our hands and put away the scary text and initially confusing features - on the contrary, that's limiting and counter-productive.
I pay for PyCharm, and if I liked VSCode better, I'd use that instead - it's free. I trust JetBrains enough to believe they won't completely replace the existing UI without giving us an option to keep using the current one, but I wish the resources going to developing this were spent in a different design direction or on other improvements.
And yet, we have complaints about a "dumbed down" interface, that is wasting space [2], that JetBrains should "fire their design team", ...
I'd love to see the age distribution of people complaining here because I personally had been hoping for this update. Design must be a balance between conservatism and progress and JetBrains nailed it in this case.
[1] They even show you the shortcuts now, which you should have been using anyways.
[2] The vertical space from the top of the window to the code is the _exact same_.
I've put in the time to learn and have muscle memory of the UI, I don't want to see that investment wasted.
Finally, Jetbrains, Eclipse etc... were intended for professional and serious uses, I detest having these new Fisher-Price interfaces where everything is dumbed down.
I'll be quite vocal about this in feedback to Jetbrains as a paid subscriber.
I just never use half the buttons on the screen by default, partially because I use key shortcuts heavily (JetBrains’ ability to use premade third party keybinds is a godsend for a multi-IDE user — all the usual Xcode shortcuts working is wondrous) or because I ignore the integrated tangentially-related bits like VCS because I prefer to use dedicated apps like Fork[0] for those.
So I think this move is fine. The big caveat I’ll add is that they need to keep a proper menubar on Windows and Linux where the system isn’t forcing the presence of such — menubars act as grand indexes of program functionality and are absolutely essential for something like an IDE. Pruning the menubar in favor of one of those blasted hamburger menus would be a huge mistake.
Can you expand on that? It seems so contrary to common sense and experience that either you must have an interesting point, or you left out a 'not'.
In a traditional product you’d just learn key combos. Until you do it seems like you’re clicking lots of buttons and menus. I feel like the command palette half bridges that gap by just making you type extra characters all along.
I’m not saying one is better than another (cue old man banging his cane on the floor), but fewer keystrokes does seem preferable over the long run.
Key shortcuts are great for things you’re doing constantly and are naturally learned quickly due to repetition. Command palettes are great for commands not used often enough for shortcuts to stick in memory, as well as for things that don’t have an associated shortcut like jumping to arbitrary files/classes/functions/etc.
It seems like a lot of software out of Central/Eastern Europe uses (or used) lots of custom UI controls. It gives the programs a certain... feel.
Has anyone else noticed this? Did Win32 controls in the past have especially poor support for non-Latin alphabets?