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Comment by ftyhbhyjnjk | Hacker News Reader

Seriously! Their slick, compact, and beautifully well laid out UI is one of the primary reasons I use I Intellij Idea.

If they force this update, I'll just not update it. Not to mention, since I now will not be updating it, I can cancel my yearly, recurring subscription too.

Hey Jetbrains: You just have to do one thing. And that is: to NOT mess up existing thing.

Even if you stop launching new features into your product for next few years, I'll still happily pay you folks just because your product is so damn perfect as of now.

Please don't ruin it. Forget what VSCode is doing. They are far far far behind you folks. Don't let THEM ruin your product.

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> Seriously! Their slick, compact, and beautifully well laid out UI is one of the primary reasons I use I Intellij Idea.

Fascinating. Their flat, contrast-less and confusing UI is one of my biggest chafing points with their product. If I want to resize an UI element, I often have to make several guesses before I find the right border, let alone pixel.

Their UI may be a bit low contrast out of the box (there are themes to fix that, luckily) but if you have a problem with it now, the new UI looks much worse. All the colors are gone and all the icons are now bland shapes.

It looks like they're copying VS Code's UI style which is a huge step backwards in my opinion. This UI minimalism looks great on paper but it's terribly confusing to actually work with and it can take weeks to get around it through sheer brute force and muscle memory.

I agree that their UI needs an overhaul but this isn't the solution.

Flat UIs, icons with no text, and countless undocumented features are the reasons I now hate using computers.

The mental overhead in trying to learn and remember what to click to achieve what I want is exhausting, and somehow, in far too many apps, there's no way to look-up what the shortcut keys are.

What are the odds of a redesign adding color / borders / 3d? The UI fashion is still trending towards a uniform single-colored surface. Hard to imagine them adding borders, let alone color

Probably not great, but still by necessity better than the odds of the UI improving while not changing at all.

On the flip side, the only thing I want Jetbrains to do is implement proper UI scaling.

I want to be able to hit Command+Plus and scale up the whole interface for presenting something to the team or when I have to code pair with someone who doesn't have as large of a monitor as I do.

Presentation mode is an absolute mess, and does not help with code pairing or code review presentations, and font scaling only affects the one file and not all the fonts, so the project navigation is still small and I have to repeat it for every file and again in reverse to reset it.

And the best past is, they could do it without impacting anyone else who doesn't need it, unlike this proposal.

> On the flip side, the only thing I want Jetbrains to do is implement proper UI scaling.

Oh man I'm still mad that if I want to present my Jetbrains IDE screen and make it readable, I have to change 2 fonts, one for the editor, one for the interface.

It's nice that it's being an accepted point of view this time.

Usually I get a lot of aggressive responses about how I don't understand presentation mode. I do, and it's crap.

By contrast, I only want the content to scale, and actively cannot stand entire UIs scaling and looking and feeling like web pages. If this was ever implemented, it would need an opt-out to please us both.

Which is fine. As I already mentioned, even if they just had a text scaling which applied to all the editors so I didn't have to keep doing it every time I opened a file that would be a massive QOL improvement.

Shift shift -> Enter Presentation Mode.

(Replace shift shift with whatever you have the “everything” search bound to).

Presentation mode is terrible for doing code pairing, code presentations, or really anything that involves screen sharing.

Presentation mode has worked well for me for code presentation for a decade both in-person on a projector and for screen sharing, across hundreds of talks. If you believe otherwise, let’s hear why rather than some kind of assertion that it must be true because you said so.

For the others… well, it’s not called screen sharing mode or code pairing mode.

> For the others… well, it’s not called screen sharing mode or code pairing mode.

So you agree that it doesn't work that great for the scenarios that I've been talking about?

But great for the scenario that the person I actually responded to described.

Curious why is that, what are the pain points specifically? I use it often when presenting and the only downside is that presentation mode forces full screen (on mac)

I lose my terminal, file tabs, project navigation.

For presenting, it is very specific on how it is meant to be used, which is not how I would present during a screen sharing exercise.

That's not entirely true, you can bring up all of those (maybe except tabs, I don't use them) while in presentation mode, you can do that with all windows. They even have bigger fonts so they're also readable

I would not like Command-Plus, as in most cases you want to increase the font size of the editor, not everything around it. Then it would work like a web app or an Electron app, which is not ideal for pro apps. But I think you do have some good points around the presentation mode.

I am perfectly fine with it scaling everything, it would certainly be better than the current situation.

Sometimes, especially when I'm pairing with a junior that has a smaller screen, I want to scale everything because I want them to see everything. In this case scaling the whole UI is a benefit even if it is a "pro" application.

YMMV, and having alternative but consistent scaling options (such as all text in the file editor rather than piecemeal) would be a massive step up from the chaos at the moment. As already mentioned, the best part of this feature rather than a full UI redesign is that you don't have to use it!

> Forget what VSCode is doing.

Except for remote development extension. Do that. It's the killer feature of VSCode.

They do that, I’m playing with it now. Have a look at Jetbrains Gateway: https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/gateway/

I'll admit I haven't looked recently, but last time I looked, it felt like Jetbrains didn't quite get my use cases for remote development. I don't want to install/manage any infrastructure at all. I just want to connect via ssh to a fresh box and have it work. If that isn't possible, back to the drawing board.

Does it work with Rider yet? At launch it didn't, something to do with Rider using (or not, I forget!) an out of process language server.

It’s supposed to work (like, it’s an option in Rider’s project selection), but it can’t find MSBuild in the WSL. I’m guessing you’d have better luck if you just spun up a normal Linux VM though.

How is it working for you? I tried the beta version last year and I was not impressed. Is it worth trying again?

I found the performance very poor and had to discontinue using it. It permanently pinned 4 cores on the remote server where VS Code used <0.25 (codebase was a very small Django app)

I tried out fleet last night and it worked amazingly well.

Why would one do remote development with laptops being as powerful as they are today (think: the raw power of an M1 Mac Book Air even).

Because my ec2 dev server is even more powerful, and I can easily upgrade the hardware configuration without spending $1k on a new laptop.

I never really appreciated a remote dev server until I had to work on a behemoth Java project and then a behemoth C++ project. Having the extra memory and the extra cores is great. Never having to worry about your laptop heating up or having your battery die due to CPU load is even better.

I guess if your IDE is as responsive as anything else locally and only the compiling and runtime happens in the cloud it might be somewhat pleasant to work with. But what if you decide to do something from a coffee shop and the WiFi is super laggy. Or doing something while traveling etc. I like to know that my dev station is independent of an Internet connection.

With crappy Internet connection you still can do remote development (it doesn't take much bandwidth, after all it's mostly text). But what if you need to download dependencies/docker images or upload e.g. docker image? With a remote development you can offload that to a beefy server with gigabit connection.

That is indeed a good point.

"Remote development" does not necessarily imply that development happens on a remote machine. I use remote development extensions to work directly on projects inside WSL2.

Same here. 'Remote' development for me isn't about how far away it is, it is about developing across (virtual/container/cloud) 'machine' boundaries.

Company policy, network topology/firewalls, having to run things in a terminal on another machine (which is already there with remote development).

7950x

Last time I tried remote development with PyCharm was when they released their "Remote development" beta in version 2021.3 [1]. It was a bad experience. Before that they only had some complicated sync workaround for remote development which I could not get used to.

I gave up on remote development with PyCharm and went with VSCode.

Based on your comment it seems they still haven't figured it out?

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/whatsnew/2021-3/#remote-de...

This is literally the only reason I use VS Code right now.

JetBrains has Code With Me, in case you hadn't seen that. I have no idea how they compare, though, so I don't mean this as a dismissal.

  > Except for remote development extension.

And the roads.

Indeed. I think they are trying to imitate VSCode UI... which in my opinion sucks big time.

We need to apply Chesterton's fence [1] in situations like this.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence

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