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Comment by StevePerkins | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what tech stack you work in primarily. But IntelliJ basically ate the Java world around 12 years ago, I haven't talked in real-life to an Eclipse (or anything else) user since 2010.

ReSharper has been a standard in the .NET world for well over a decade. If you're a C# developer and you don't use it, then you are at least familiar with it.

In the Python world, I believe that PyCharm has somewhere between 1/3 and 50% market share. That and VS Code are the two main games in town.

I'm not as well connected to other ecosystems, but I believe that RubyMine and PhpStorm are very prominent in the Ruby and PHP worlds.

I mean basically, in 2022 I would say that the vast majority of developers fall into one of 3 categories:

* They use a Jetbrains product.

* They use VS Code (I guess you can throw full-blown Visual Studio into this bucket as well).

* They use a plain text editor, instead of an IDE or more IDE-like tool.

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>They use a plain text editor, instead of an IDE or more IDE-like tool.

For java development? I mean, it's not illegal, but...

It's actually surprisingly decent after you've enabled the Java extensions. vscode is noticably faster, and has generally most of the important features at this point too, though they're sometimes hard to discover (i.e you'll need to go through the command palette for creating a new class, instead of right click -> create a new class)

I still default to intellij though but I'm paying for a private license, so i might just be biased

"Create class" is not an important feature.

Jumping straight to implementations, finding all callers, immediately finding all invalid sites when you update a function, refactoring function signatures, extracting+lifting+moving methods, rewriting code into newer styles, decompiling and jumping into external libraries when debugging, understanding things like Spring config files ... the list just goes on.

Most of that works to a degree. The create class was just an example.

Fwiw: I'm not trying to convince anyone to switch over to vscode either... But it is surprisingly decent once you get used to the fact that you have to trigger basically everything through the command palette.

And some of the named features occasionally fail spectacularly with intellij too, depending on the project.

It's not as bad as you think. Eclipse has LSP daemon[1] that can be used by any editor that speaks LSP.

[1]: https://github.com/eclipse/eclipse.jdt.ls

It depends on how much time you spend getting your editor setup.

You’re leaving out a few industries - Game development mostly takes place usinh Visual Studio, iOS Development is 95% XCode.

There’s also specialized industries like Qt clients which probably use Qt Creator (there’s barely any editor understanding QML).

Gamedev here. Nope.

We use Unity, so we're writing C#. We use Rider.

I work in the games industry, we use Visual Studio... With ReSharper ;)

I would be shocked if Rider doesn't become the industry standard IDE for game development. My experience with Rider in UE4 and UE5 has been outstanding since I switched last year. It's a night and day difference between using Rider and using Visual Studio.

Most of the folk I know who develop in golang use their goland IDE.

Their CI/CD server (team city) is also fantastic and I've been using it for over a decade.

I work on a golang team and we're all VSCode. But most of us started in another language that is more typically VSCode-friendly, so maybe that's it?

Could be. I started with Visual Studio + Resharper for .NET since ~2006. JetBrains IDEs for everything else and I am "allergic" to VSCode's UX. I can't explain it, but I just can't stomach the layout.

Personally last time I tried vscode as a basic text editor it felt kinda sluggish (not to mention lacking in features) compared to anything by jetbrains, so much so I just use intellij for even basic text editing these days.

I’m still using Sublime Text for basic text editing because it’s startup speed still seems unmatched.

At least give Sublime Text a credit. It should be a small market share but some people like it.

And there's probably a larger pie for those using vim/emacs. Though I seriously have problem understanding how vim can be any better than JetBrains or VS Code with vim key binding enabled.

Well, a part of it is that at least VSC's Vim extension is rubbish and is unusable if you don't use the defaults.

Yes, I have considered just patching whatever I need for my own keybinds, but I decided I was just more comfortable sticking with neovim.

Another part is that VSC has annoying input lag

There still are a few of us who prefer other tools.

I'm actually delighted everytime I can use NetBeans, but I am still a paying Jetbrains user because I work on projects who use Kotlin (wonderful language even if I dislike that it is only supported in IntelliJ).

That said I like Jetbrains the company even if I don't like IntelliJ and I try to help them pick up the good parts from NetBeans (Just Works, Absolutely Amazing Maven integration, Sane Defaults).

For whatever it's worth, my wife's (fairly small) project is still on Eclipse since before 2010. They know it and like it.

18 years of working mostly java dev, still on Eclipse. Yes its simpler. No its not for performance although on typical corporate hardware any performance gain is strongly appreciated. I prefer running command lines in ie git or maven/gradle to learn/keep using the tools even when there are plugins for pure clicking.

Even won some personal license of Idea on some Belgian java conference around 2007 (javapolis? way too long ago), but it never sticked with me for too long (back then it was significantly slower IDE but already more powerful than most peers).

A few devs within company use Idea, but there are no strict requirements. Code is easily portable between those and nothing IDE specific ever goes to git repos. It really doesn't matter that much in enterprise Java, if anybody tells you otherwise they are probably junior or do something very niche in this realm.

Thanks saiya-jin -- great insights. I think it's amazing how strong opinions can be on tools!

> but I believe that RubyMine and PhpStorm are very prominent in the Ruby and PHP worlds.

In my domain (enterprise and high scalability PHP) PHPStorm straight won, there is PHPstorm, then a long way behind vscode and then everyone else.

Yeah ReSharper has definitely been de-facto standard in .NET space since at least the C# 2.0 days. The only reasons I don't use it are that it's incredibly buggy and JetBrains' customer service is atrocious - the productivity value was tremendous.

>I haven't talked in real-life to an Eclipse (or anything else) user

Ahem. We like to stay out of these wars because Eclipse is not a text editor with extensions but a full-fledged IDE. That said, I haven't looked into IntelliJ in a while - do they still reccomend switching to the eclipse compiler for performance reasons?

performance has gotten much better since IntelliJ 11 iirc. that was when I swapped over from eclipse to intelliJ, the initial startup time was still longer but performance was pretty much the same after that. Prior to that I was still using eclipse cause of how slow IntelliJ was

-- the yaffascripts - nodejs mostly --

VS Code users are generally pretty junior or solo. Once a developer gets serious they'll usually need to go to a full IDE and that's either a JetBrains product or Visual Studio (xcode for Apple).

This is unbelievably inaccurate.

> VS Code users are generally pretty junior or solo. Once a developer gets serious they'll usually need to go to a full IDE

If you mean exclusive "VS Code users" then maybe.

As an IDE user for one file type (in my case *.cs ) I still find VS code a very useful tool for any other file types. I can install linters and formatters for them, e.g. for yaml, json, xml, text etc. and VS code then makes a great editor, hits a good spot between "still fairly light and fast" and "has features".

An IDE focuses on one task. VS code complements it by being a "swiss army knife"

After Crockford's "js is scheme" claim, curly emacs was bound to eventually happen. If you come to VS code from e.g. IntelliJ, the UI is surprisingly opaque, considering its undoubtedly graphic nature. Not quite C-m M-c M-butterfly opaque, but not that far from it.

> If you come to VS code from e.g. IntelliJ, the UI is surprisingly opaque, considering its undoubtedly graphic nature

You don't need to memorise all the things in VS Code, just know to open the "Command Pallete", and that's on the menu.

That works just about the same way in intellij.

IJ does have the "search everywhere" that can be used like the command palette, but it's still far from abandoning the idea of trying to make everything available in menu trees and the like. Plugins add cute pictures to the toolbar like it's 1999. VS:C is far more radical, there's The Palette and that's it.

Wow that hurts.

Visual Studio (Full, not Code) has a Mac version now, albeit it's a totally different codebase to the Windows edition (AFAIK a much updated version of what was MonoDevelop).

Shots fired! Didn't know Rob Pike can't even pass up as a junior - the man doesn't even use syntax highlight.

How "general" is Rob Pike though, I wonder? I'd say he's exceptional, given his track record.

At least four star general

The opposite for me, I'm one of those psychos who switched from VS to VSCode, and the majority of what I write is in C#. I decided I wanted to get extremely familiar with the dotnet CLI and how all of the tooling and build systems work, instead of relying on the conveniences provided by Visual Studio.

How do you handle profiling/debugging and the many more things that VS does?

Debugging is fine, you can attach a debugger from VSCode no problem. For profiling, the truth is I usually don't profile lol. But if I did I would just use JetBrains' dotTrace.

I must be Benjamin Button then :). I feel it's the reverse: juniors need all the IDE support they can get for more context, seniors can do more with less.

I gave up on IntelliJ after failing to stop the frequent re-indexing that would make my workstation unusable, and restarting the IDE would trigger another re-index which could succeed, or hang. I hope they fixed that, but I didn't stick around to find out - and I had been paying for a license for years out of my own pocket too. VSCode just reminded me that I don't have to wait needlessly - I had become inured to slow IDEs.

I find IntelliJ to be quite fast. How big is your project?

This was many years ago, but IIRC, it was about 7-10kLoC at the time. Would you say IntelliJ is as fast as VS Code?

It's a subtle question. I'd say IntelliJ is less responsive, but I wouldn't say it's any slower. When stressed, IntelliJ's UI will get choppy and usually show a progress bar at the bottom. VSCode tends to keeps running at 60fps and stick a plain "Loading..." string somewhere in the UI.

This feels like a crock statement. A Sr developer who's efficient uses every tool at their disposal to be efficient and productive. Primitive IDEs and text editors may help your geek cred score, but as a long term java dev who's moved into Kotlin and go recently, vs code was borderline terrible and very limited in what I wanted in features. I never used intellij until my most recent company (eclipse mostly beforehand) but they really do a good job at streamlining the dev flow. I do miss eclipses much more dynamic layouts and arguably better integration with some external technologies, but idea's Kotlin integration has been top notch and makes for quite brisk in-the-flow coding experience like no other.

As for hitching and speed, intellij has a poor 15 seconds on my laptop before it's super snappy and basically never drops perf whatever I'm hammering at. I think the common feature rich IDE slowness strawman is a defence for what's better expressed as an opinion. If you like featureless ides, have at it.

> This feels like a crock statement. A Sr developer who's efficient uses every tool at their disposal to be efficient and productive.

Correct: and in my case, VS Code with my customizations (plugins + configs) is more than equal to the task, it does everything I'd want from a full-blown IDE, and does it in a snap. Being disrupted by your IDE is maddening because it only happens when you're in deep focus.

My IDE journey was similar to yours Eclipse -> Jetbrains, then what started off as a casual affair with VS Code on personal projects ended up being serious indeed.

I felt like it was easier to add features I want to VS Code than to remove/disable fearures from IntelliJ to trim the fat, YMMV. I'm glad to hear IntelliJ s now consistently fast after initialization - when I last used it, the slow downs were unpredictable and lasted minutes, and occasionally required restarting the IDE, but that was a long time ago, back when SSD storage was expensive.

Vscode is all dandy and fine until you try to debug something and inspect an object in memory only to find out that msft programmers hard coded the object representation as a string [Object object] cause they couldn’t be bothered to properly implement the debugger.

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