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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

This looks really promising. But by far the biggest moat that Jetbrains is going to have to cross to get into VSCode territory is the plugin ecosystem. Personally I work on React projects so my first thought was: "is there a Prettier[1] plugin?". Looking through the landing page it looks like Plugins are in the works but until that is implemented, it's going to be hard adopting it.

ALSO I just noticed this but can someone (ideally from JetBrains) explain what this line means: "Requires login and periodic connection to JetBrains servers to verify the project" (specifically the last 3 words of that sentence). Quite frankly this line is extremely alarming, are you saying that you're scanning my project to make sure it's not a "professional" project? I'm going to assume this line means that they are checking the IDE and not your source but I won't be using this product until I get an explanation for this. You can find this at the very bottom in the licensing and pricing section.

[1]: https://prettier.io/

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JetBrains employee here, and I can clarify the point about “Requires login and periodic connection to JetBrains servers to verify the project”. If you are using Fleet in a Free (hobby) mode, we are verifying that the project comply with one of three criteria: 1. your project is local (no Git or Git Remote). 2. your project is public on GitHub. 3. your project is private but has less than 3 committers. In this case, we will need a periodic connection to JetBrains servers to exchange information verifying that you can use Fleet for free, but in no way we would send any sensitive information, such as source code, file names, etc.

If you have Fleet license (paid, for example) there are no criteria checks at all, just the license verification with your JetBrains Account. And we plan to support offline usage similar to how it’s done for IntelliJ IDEA-based IDEs now (offline license keys, floating license server.)

Right now Fleet is in the EAP, and there are no licensing checks at all, they are not yet implemented, and we are not yet done with the verification workflow design.

Will the pricing be same for all users or do users with existing licences (e.g. Ultimate) get a discount on Fleet licence?

We are not ready to share more details on pricing yet, but we are working on it. Will share as soon as we have it!

> your project is public on GitHub.

What about Gitlab, or some other repo such as gitlab.gnome.org? This seems like it's ripe for edge cases.

Yeah, right, I was not specific enough on this one. It'll definitely go beyond GitHub, extending to some other git solutions, but we don't have a decision whether it's "any" public repo or public repo hosted on the service from some list (like, GitHub, GitLab, Gitee, etc.) We'll look into it later on.

gitlab.gnome.org - I'd expect it to be all open source, right? Open source program should cover such cases.

I really hope that in further investigation you (JetBrains) realize how futile it is to attempt to automate defining something like this.

The best-case scenario I can imagine is that I have to enter a public URL into the editor that JetBrains can then `git clone` from their server.

I can’t imagine “JetBrains curates a list of all public git servers” ends well. (As a Tildegit user.)

[off topic] Are you guys affected by the situation in Russia, or have all JetBrains employees left the country already?

They have stated their position really clearly (and much more clearly than most companies): https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/03/11/jetbrains-stateme...

I wasn't asking about the company position...

It's not clear what you are asking then. You should clarify.

The info in the link provided addresses the only concrete portion of your comment, which is that, yes, most Russian employees have moved elsewhere.

"Suspending R&D" sounds like no work is done in Russia anymore.

They opened a company in Serbia so I guess that some of the Russian employees already moved to Belgrade.

New office opened in Cyprus, lots of positions open on their site. I assume they are expanding out of Russia.

Your IDEs' project management are broken for people who use git CLI (everyone?): https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-183490

The issue is marked "shelved" while consistently active. Do you have any ability to run this up the flagpole, please? I and many others would be very grateful.

Emacs keys would be awesome...

I never understood what's the point of Emacs keys without elisp and Emacs plugins. Emulating only the editor part of Emacs without the rest of what makes Emacs great is not something I would spend time on.

Muscle memory. I gave up on Emacs as an editor almost 15 years ago but having spent the prior 15 using it for coding I still set most of my cli editing to use emacs key-bindings and use it in my IDEs.

Doesn’t everyone run a git init even if you never push it anywhere? My local projects usually get git with in an hour of me working on them.

I'm sorry, I know this is off topic, but I've been looking around at the Fleet docs and can't quite find an answer to this so far, so just hoping you might have an answer.

Does the front end stack of Fleet allow one to run it in a browser when using a remote back end? The same way you can run the back end of VS Code or JupyterLab on a server and render the front end in a browser tab?

I understand you can run the front end locally on your desktop and the back end configured as a remote on a server, but the rendering of the front end in a browser is what I need for the dev environment I need to use at work[1].

[1]: https://www.dominodatalab.com/

Running fronted in browser is not possible at the moment.

Got it, thank you!

I don't care why but this is creepy. Use a token in a public repo, not some sort of callback scheme. My IDE should not be doing authorization checks that involve telling a third party what I'm working on, under any circumstances.

Then don't use the product for free?

Or maybe... find a way to not be creepy? They're the ones trying to convince people to move from VSCode.

Luckily, Microsoft has a track record of being totally non-creepy about your data.

Is that sarcasm?

The amount of data that VSCode collects dwarfs this though.

It's a single toggle to turn off all telemetry (anonymized, limited to feature usage - no reporting of source files/projects that I've seen), which takes a few seconds to configure at install time as it's literally a menu item (Code > Preferences > Telemetry):

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry

You can also dump all possible telemetry events at the command-line.

You can’t really shut down all VSCode telemetry.

Source: https://www.roboleary.net/tools/2022/04/20/vscode-telemetry....

FTA:

> Next, I wanted to see what would happen when I disabled telemetry. After some activity, I checked the log, and found no events were logged. That is good.

One paragraph after:

> The absence of logged events doesn’t mean that data is not being sent though! A more accurate way to see what is being sent out is to monitor your outgoing network traffic and analyze the packets.

But unfortunately the author doesn't do that

A bit further down they say

> It looks like you cannot shut telemetry off 100%. These settings will opt you of most data sharing scenarios; but not all data sharing scenarios

And even VSCodium doesn't take it all out

> Even though we do not pass the telemetry build flags (and go out of our way to cripple the baked-in telemetry), Microsoft will still track usage by default.

You can, just install vscodium

Than we are talking about different product.

Source?

I’ll just stick with not using JetBrains software like I haven’t for the past two decades. Bloated and slower than Eclipse.

Nope nope nope. This is creepy and I can guarantee that it'll be headache after headache. I'll stick to the alternatives so long as this is the policy. Not even going to look at it.

Manual rule that never gets defined for good sounds like a trouble waiting to happen. It will cause many support tickets asking for every edge cases and some will be angry for not being approved.

If you're really trying to win VS Code users, such a flexible rule may scare them away.

> But by far the biggest moat that Jetbrains is going to have to cross to get into VSCode territory is the plugin ecosystem. Personally I work on React projects so my first thought was: "is there a Prettier[1] plugin?".

This just reinforces my feeling that a major driver behind VSCode's popularity is that people just don't know better [1]

1. Download WebStorm (or IDEA) and write some React in it. And Typescript. Refactor. Move code around. Use suggestions. It's leaps and bounds ahead of VSCode

2. Open settings, navigate to plugins, type in Prettier. Oh look, there's the plugin. An official plugin from JetBrains

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=33176123

>It's leaps and bounds ahead of VSCode

It's also paid vs free. For some reason, some people are very reluctant to pay for tools, even though they use them every day in their job.

> For some reason, some people are very reluctant to pay for tools, even though they use them every day in their job.

This also really baffles me. You can see it a lot in various discussions even here on HN.

Because if your tooling is closed source (and if it's paid it almost certainly is) then your ability to maintain a project is dependent on some corporation's willingness to continue to support the tooling etc.

Not really in the case of Jetbrains vs VScode, because if the fateful day came, it would simply be an inconvenience to have to set up the alternative, not the end of the world.

Most of intellij is open-source.

If the possibility of your tooling being discontinued is a real concern for you, paying for a Jetbrains license is your best bet. Their entire business is developer tooling: IntelliJ isn't going away until Jetbrains goes under, and they're not going under until people stop paying them. Microsoft, on the other hand, could decide to drop VSCode at any point as soon as the bean counters start questioning how it's benefiting the bottom line.

And if Microsoft decides to kill VSCode, I seriously doubt anyone is going to keep maintaining it at the place where it is now. Even if someone decides to continue maintaining the base editor, Microsoft abandoning it will pretty quickly dry up the plugin ecosystem.

"It's open source, so it will always be available to me" only really makes sense if your backup plan is to maintain it yourself. In the case of VSCode, you are relying on a whole ecosystem continuing to survive after the sponsor abandons it.

It's worth noting that JetBrains has a long history of successfully competing against free IDEs, which were normally always more popular than IntelliJ. First there was NetBeans (bought and open sourced by Sun very early), then there was Eclipse (developed and open sourced by IBM), now there is VSCode. Heck there are probably others I don't know about. So, this is nothing new for them.

Usually what happens is that after enough years have passed, the company funding the free IDE starts to wonder why exactly they're spending so much money to give away the results. The original passion-project founders have moved on, leaving behind maintenance devs who aren't motivated to defend it. Eventually it gets stripped to a handful of devs and donated to Apache. In the meantime IntelliJ continues to develop new features.

The question VSCode users might wonder about is what's Microsoft's strategy here? They have plenty of money, but then again so did Sun/Oracle and IBM. Is there a long term commercial plan to let the VSCode team justify themselves.

> The question VSCode users might wonder about is what's Microsoft's strategy here? They have plenty of money, but then again so did Sun/Oracle and IBM. Is there a long term commercial plan to let the VSCode team justify themselves.

Exactly, especially since VSCode is also an "open-core" product, just like JetBrain's products (the community versions are open-source).

The difference is that the other parts are still free, as in beer. But this is precisely what makes the offer weird to me and makes me think there's a shady angle being played.

Well, I doubt it's shady. Seems more likely they don't know what to charge for it and are incentivized to create user growth rather than revenue growth.

As long as you can build the project with standard tools (e.g. npm for javascript, maven/gradle for Java etc.) you can survive your favorite IDE disappearing suddenly from one day to the other. It is more o less a requirement if you use CI/CD and a non issue anyway since any decent IDE can generate and synchronize a project using an external tools as a source of truth.

Easy solution: make your employer pay for it. IntelliJ tools increase my productivity where saved time easily goes into days, it's easily justified from a cost perspective to an employer.

It is precisely because I use it every day that I use VSCode. As much as I like some of the features of JetBrains IDEs I have also had more headaches with them than VSCode. For example at my previous employer our dev machines weren’t great and I routinely needed to have multiple projects open at once. If I tried doing that in IntelliJ it would make my computer basically unusable. When I gave up and used VSCode for all of my projects I was able to have all the projects I needed open without any issues and without really losing any productivity. If JetBrains IDEs were lighter on the system I would consider switching back to them, but honestly at this point I don’t see a benefit in switching back.

> For some reason, some people are very reluctant to pay for tools, even though they use them every day in their job.

I used to pay Jetbrains annually, out of my own pocket. I continued paying fir a personal license even after my employer bought me another license. Jetbrains then made a stupid, greedy decision[1] (and walked or back within days), but I was done with them and canceled my subscription.

Since then, my experience/growth, languages tech stacks and codebases have connived to make Jetbrains superior discoverability moot (not using Java!), I found out other IDEs are good enough for me.

1. Some years back, they decided on an IDE-as-a-service path where they were going to brick your IDE the day your subscription lapsed. The fact that they thought this was acceptable and announced it means they cannot be trusted, IMO.

Some years back, they decided on an IDE-as-a-service path where they were going to brick your IDE the day your subscription lapsed.

No they didn't. This is a total mischaracterisation of how JB's subscription works.

I think they did, but then walked back and announced that you will just fallback to the previous version of whatever IDE you were subscribed to if you cancel the subscription. I think the situation caused quite a backlash when they announced the original plans.

I clearly mentioned they walked back the decision within days of the initial announcement.

I don't understand how you could possibly have read my comment as describing their current licensing practices, with the tenses I was using.

You can go read up on the disastrous announcement and the followup at https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/03/introducing-jetbr...

Fair enough - I guess we will have to agree to disagree on whether that warrants never trusting them again.

> I found out other IDEs are good enough for me.

IDEs as in plural, like several IDEs? What IDEs are you using now? I'm yet to find something that is as good for several languages as Idea Ultimate? Yes, for some languages Vscode plugin is superior, but overall as a polyglot I find Idea experience the best all things considered.

Sure but WebStorm is targeted solely/mainly at JavaScript development.

What if my employer has N repos and several other languages, and JavaScript is just one of those.

VSCode allows me to stay with the same interface across multiple different repos.

Yes, if I’m doing Ruby or Java or C# I might choose a _different_ IDE for certain tasks in that language. But with a few plugins you can get a reasonably good generalist tool in VSCode, and even a pretty full featured one for certain languages

It's not. At least as far as I can tell, the different Jetbrains IDEs are more like configurations or flavors of the same underlying thing. You can do most things in most of their IDEs.

You should try paying for an IDE. VSCode is great but if you're an engineer getting paid anywhere close to a Silicon Valley wage (or you can expense devtools), you deserve better :)

> It’s not.

From the WebStorm page on JetBrains:

> WebStorm The smartest JavaScript IDE WebStorm is an integrated development environment for JavaScript and related technologies. Like other JetBrains IDEs, it makes your development experience more enjoyable, automating routine work and helping you handle complex tasks with ease.

They come with a bunch of "pre-configurations". I used to have PyCharm, and now I've switched to IntelliJ. I can still do everything I could with PyCharm, which was itself a superset of WebStorm.

Sure, some things are organized a bit differently, but basically, if you want to use multiple languages, just get IntelliJ, and you'll be set. It's cheaper than buying several other products, too.

The only one that seems a bit different is CLion, in that it does things that IntelliJ doesn't, and vice-versa.

I believe AppCode and Rider are more examples of JetBrains IDEs that do things that IntelliJ Ultimate can't.

Appcode, Rider, CLion and Goland are not available as language plugins to other IDEs.

Go most certainly is: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9568-go but for the rest you are correct

There's Golang plugin for Intellij Ultimate. https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9568-go

Right, your comment implies that you can't use e.g. Webstorm for non-JS development. You can, and it'll be a pretty darn good experience. Webstorm just happens to be optimized for web stuff, and there are other IDEs that are optimized for other things.

So the answer to, "what if my employer has a repo of language X and then a different repo of Y?" is: it's very likely not a problem, because the IDEs are not as specialized as you're clearly imagining them to be.

> pretty darn good experience

At least when I last did this about two years ago, it wasn't. There are a ton of edge cases. For example, only CLion supported stepping through Rust in a debugger.

I was considering CLion, but decided against it because I frequently need to work with a bunch of different programming languages in a single project, not just C or C++, and not just the languages they happen to have an IDE for. It seems like Jetbrains does this so you're forced to buy multiple IDEs if you need support for a multiple languages. I don't even know how that's supposed to work. If I need to switch to editing Python, am I expected to open a second IDE? CLion supports plugins, but it doesn't seem like they offer a plugin that brings it on par with PyCharm (because if they did that, they couldn't sell you a second product)

For highly specialized development teams I guess it makes sense, but for me it'd just be a waste of money.

That's why I use Sublime Text, since it's the only (good) editor that's compatible with anything I need it to do. An alternative like Fleet is very interesting, but it's still too early to make a fair comparison (Also that Adobe-esque "toolbox" app isn't winning it any points)

most of their ides are plugins for language support basically. i use idea for java, c, golang and python. as well as the built in db ide stuff that is standalone as datagrip

I often have all three of CLion, WebStorm, and PyCharm open. I'm pretty sure I could use IntelliJ for all the use-cases, but the configuration presets make it easier to open all three. As far as memory use goes, I've not had problems -- it seems much more that resources scale with the number of projects open, rather than the number of IDEs open.

I open polyglot projects in whichever IDE is the closest superset of the languages it uses. Which normally means whatever language the service is written in, and plugins for other languages.

While the various product are more or less different flavors of the same program, if you want do work on a polyglot project the best choice is probably Idea since is the more flexible. The others have a better out of the box experience for a specific language but have a few limitations here and there.

For example (and if I remember correctly), Webstorm doesn't support a project with different modules, so if you want to split it in two or more parts you have to either create it with Idea and "import" it in Webstorm, or manually edit the project file.

I have paid and vscode is simply a better product

IntelliJ Ultimate lets you install all of the different language toolkits into one IDE via plugins.

Except C++.

And the C++ IDE (Clion) supports most language plugins, but not Go...

Other than that, IntelliJ is as universal as it gets.

I officially have a copy of pycharm and not webstorm. I use it to maintain both a python repo and a typescript repo. You can install language support for almost every official jetbrains language into basically any jetbrains editor. The only differences I have found are the default plug-ins and the app icon.

Interesting, I didn’t know that but it makes sense to me

Are you sure that works for all languages? I think it's just that the Javascript/Typescript plugins are made available to all IDEs.

It certainly used to be (and I believe its still the case) that the "major" language plugins besides JS are only usable in their specific IDE or in IDEA Ultimate (which can run all of them) (i.e. PHP w/ PHPStorm, Ruby w/ RubyMine and Python w/ PyCharm)

Nope, not sure, but I've yet to run into a wall using it daily for the past 2 years.

Almost all of the jetbrain products are just intellij with a different set of plugins preinstalled (with perhaps the exception of clion which has a bit more native integration with debuggers), so you can quite likely just use intellij with a few plugins you want for everything.

Rider is also a bit different in how it handles Visual Studio solution / project files AFAIK. You can definitely rig up IntelliJ for e.g. Python development, but PyCharm is going to be a far better experience.

I pay for the All Products Pack purely out of convenience - If I wanted to spend a ton of time tweaking my IDE, I'd go back to Emacs!

I am currently using Python with IntelliJ. What exactly am I missing from PyCharm?

> This just reinforces my feeling that a major driver behind VSCode's popularity is that people just don't know better

I am very happy that VSCode is mostly just editor.

I’m pretty sure the verification is going to just be the normal jetbrains license verification service stuff. Since if anything I use has been shut down or offline for about that long I notice it phoning home to check my account license.

JetBrains/IDEA/IntelliJ/whatever is the name now has quite a good plugin support.

I have looked into source codes of some and were horrified, but well, some people actually like Java and like that sort of stuff. Maybe I looked into wrong ones.

VSCode plugins seems to be easier to write, but maybe that’s because I know JavaScript already.

What made me switch to VSCode is that it’s generally snappier, IDEA has the “Indexing” mode that always takes forever

Just to add:

Fleet seems like a new lighter architecture. Which is fantastic. My hope is they can actually bring the tools from their other platforms into this.

Otherwise... they might as well just sell a IDE plugin architecture for VSCode.

"New thing not perfect!"

webstorm is the way to go for react and other web type stuff... though I'm not sure if the intention of fleet is for it to be free forever or not.

Probably same than previous pricing model - you need license for commercial use.

Sounds like license verification.

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