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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

> 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

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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?

>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.

> 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.

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