Ask HN: Is there editors and IDE crisis? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there editors and IDE crisis?

20 pointsiillexial54 comments

I have started feeling that we hit a editors and IDEs crisis. Basically, right now, we only have two big players - VS Code and Jetbrains. There also Sublime, Atom, but I don't feel they are very popular.

For me, VS Code is too buggy, at least for Go, and Jetbrains is too resource-heavy. There is new product of jetbrains, which is Fleet, but they require you to install Jetbrains Toolbox for it, which I don't want at all, and I don't feel that Fleet has an improved performance.

Now I'm back to using Neovim and couldn't be happier. What do you think is the future of IDEs and editors? Is there something new I'm missing out?

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One of the biggest developments, imho, happened in this generation of editors, the Language Server Protocol [0]. Originally from VSCode.

What used to be the realm of the big chunky IDEs, intellisense/autocomplete, is now available to any editor big or small.

And even better, the lsp’s are maintained by the language teams themselves.

Wine yes, there’s 2 major players right now, there’s a lot of pieces about if you think you have a better approach.

I think VScode will have staying power for a very long time, because it’s built on arguably the most used language. And so the pool of programmers to hack it, extend it, fix and improve it is truly enormous.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Server_Protocol

I think VSCode really ensured long time persistance for themselves when they refactored into a client-server model. Is there even a usecase for Theia now that Vscode Server is OSS and exists.

VSCode was born as client-server model, if anything they pivoted into desktop to gather more audience.

"Erich Gamma: VS Code an Overnight Success… 10 years in the making"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hilznKQij7A

Weird, I was just having the opposite thought the other day. Emacs seems to be going through an explosion in productivity. There are so many new improvements as of late that it's hard to keep up.

Byte compilation has sped things up, tramp makes working with networked drives a breeze, magit makes git a breeze, LSP (language server mode) is improving interactivity with your code. Org-mode is an amazing markdown language and knowledge base, task manager, etc. The documentation is good for just about everything I come across. Integration with slack, mastodon, gemini, etc. Even the games and browsers are nice.

My friends that use vim seem to be comfortably moving along so I'm sure things are similar there.

Peak IDE happened in 1998 with Visual Studio 6 for C++, and it had been down hill from there. Everything available today (and since then) is clunky in comparison. I kept using it until 2007 and had to switch because of the need to move to 64-but.

Computers today are about 20 times faster, and have 20 times more memory - and yet, all IDEs are clunky. VS6 on the common hardware of the time was ultra responsive.

Using a 1998 application in 2007 must have felt very snappy sure.

I remember using it in 1998, with little memory on spinning rust. It was clunky as hell and very clueless. Big projects took ages to be built. Crashes were so frequent it was ridiculous.

It definitely had crashes, especially with C++ intellisense - visual assist was a must for crashes (and the functionality was also nice).

I had been using it since 1998 on reasonable hardware. It was always reasonable for me.

Peak IDE was Turbo Pascal 5. Change my mind!

It's not worth changing, because you never experienced Symantec THINK C on System 7 in 1999, back before macs were cool :P

Worthy response

Although in my defense Macs -especially ones powerful enough to be fun - were unattainable expensive for me from childhood through the late 90s.

I don't perceive an IDE crisis.

We've never had it so good! There are multiple options, most of them are "free" and they'll all get the job done.

Each of them has their own particular quirks, but I wouldn't describe any of the mainstream offerings as "bad".

I recently started to use helix (https://helix-editor.com/) and it felt like a step forwards. A modal editor, way faster than VS Code, and with a nicer design than vim, e.g. selection->action instead of action->selection.

That looks nice, I'll have to check it out!

Yes, there is a crisis. The "Atom" editor is a good example of what happens when your editor is maintained by a business.

The majority of people are investing in tools that wont be around in 20 years time. Emacs and vim are likely safe, not so sure about the rest of them.

There are still people happily using XEmacs and it's not like the pace of development was breakneck for GNU Emacs itself or of upstream vim until there was neovim to compete with.

I'm sure VSCodium could survive as an editor even if Microsoft got bored. There's certainly at least enough community support to port it to newer OSes and maintain stuff like OpenVSX

I guess we'll see, lets hope we're alive and in the industry long enough to see the outcome. I'm very hesitant to trust any corporate sponsored product to continue after the company has lost interest.

The time I save using jetbrains today is well worth the "risk" of having to learn a new tool sometime in the next 20 years.

I’ve been using IntelliJ since version 2. It is the best tool I’ve ever used. It’s grown with me throughout my career, and supported almost every language and change that I’ve needed. I had to resort to using Xcode because I was doing iOS development. I tried AppCode, but my iOS days ended soon anyway. I am completely content and happy paying Jetbrains for the software. It’s high-quality, it’s awesome. I remember people trying to get me to use Eclipse back in the day, that’s a piece of garbage slung together.

I think IntelliJ is great, but there is no doubt that it's a massive resource hog. I work on a legacy project that is probably doing many things wrong, and IntelliJ is sometimes using so much memory on it that the OOM killer just kills my IDE.

Tools come and go. I can't even easily remember the names of all the editors I've used over the decades. It's just part of the process.

Not necessarily -- you're universalizing your experience.

I learned vim in the nineties and still use it daily. I can play it like a piano.

There is simply no substitute for deep-trained muscle memory. I don't futz; I just sort of want and the cursor is there and the paragraph is changed, etc.

The risk, though, is that I have to protect this muscle memory like a precious investment. I actively avoid tooling that prevents me from using it, or will create a bunch of conflicting habits. I'm effectively married to vim, and, to be more specific, the extremely dialed-in neovim config I use.

Like a pianist. Because musicians aren't the only ones who need an HD realtime uplink to their minds.

I agonize over shortcut changes and consider long-term impact on typing speed, because typing speed -- like website loading speed -- is conceptual fidelity, and can make the difference between capturing an idea and losing it forever.

I'm always surprised that other engineers don't notice this, but then again, I didn't really notice it either, until I got severe carpal tunnel for a year or two back in the mid '10s.

> Not necessarily -- you're universalizing your experience.

Perhaps I was overly terse; I meant to do the opposite, with regard to the limited perspective represented in the previous comment!

> I don't futz; I just sort of want and the cursor is there and the paragraph is changed, etc.

Our strategies are very different, but it sounds like our experiences feel much the same. I don't really think about editing at all; my fingers just do what years of practice have trained them to do, while my conscious mind works on the actual problem.

I made my own quirky commitment to keyboarding speed: I learned to touch-type very young, using the Dvorak layout, and I've been cruising along at 100 wpm ever since. I have never learned QWERTY at all, so a normal keyboard cripples me - I become a slow, clumsy, two-fingered hunt-and-pecker, for whom getting any text into the machine represents a significant labor. (This is the primary reason I rejected vim, twenty-odd years ago - the Dvorak layout scrambled its command mode into anti-ergonomic chaos.)

In that way, I very much agree with your belief that typing speed matters! I have simply found it in a different layer of the stack.

Fascinating -- I too once had to choose between my mastery of Dvorak and mastery of vim.

I choose vim, but I agree that I was forced to choose by how hecking terrible it is to use vim under Dvorak.

If anyone who is reading wants a cool project, make a kakaoune-like Dvorak-specialized text-mode editor!

I believe it's more of a desktop software crisis. I think that IDEs, for the large part, are actually the most active part of this sector.

Jetbrains Toolbox is not to be feared, especially if you want to keep up to date with all the latest EAP versions.

VSCode has been fantastic for me, I love it. It serves 99% of my editing needs.

The only IDE I like more is Android studio. If it weren't for the dang Storage Access Framework getting in the way, it would probably be one of my very favorite dev experiences ever.

I don't know anything about Go, but I wouldn't be surprised if VSCode improves on that front.

The other editor I occasionally use is Nano, usually to edit config files via SSH.

I have been using Vim for 20 years. I have tried other editors and even gave them a fair try (1+ months of use) but always end up back in vim.

I'm of a similar mind. I can appreciate all of the neat features that an IDE can provide, but I rarely end up using most of them. I really just need a distraction-free text editor with a couple bells and whistles sprinkled on top. Vim and a few Vundle plugins does the trick.

I think it's the opposite. Lots of developers seem to move to vscode. I have been using VIM for a decade and yet vscode also convinced me. The ecosystem seems to be striving. Ruby has been hard to integrate into any IDE and vscode seems to be able to somehow manage to convince the whole community to move towards a better integration. I haven't seen that before.

I've been using VSCode for Golang (3 years) & Python (1+ year) and I've never had too much troubles with it. It definitely not perfect but it does the job quite well. Jetbrains' IntelliJ Idea and Datagrip are still the best for other languages for me but yeah it's been a while since I've used any other IDEs.

As far as I know Eclipse and Netbeans are still around and updated but they're not breaking the news so I'm not sure about them.

As other said LSP are a big thing and even if they are mostly popular around VSCode and neovim's user they can be used with any other LSP compatible clients

I use Notepad3 for everything. It even has a Linux version courtesy of WINE. Sometimes Notepad++ if I'm working with loads of files, and need to switch between multiple documents. The tabs are a life-saver.

I've tried Sublime Text but never used any of their features. I mean, the features are cool and all, but sometimes you don't need all that cruft. You just want to code, without being 'helped' along the way.

Vim and Emacs are for the hardcore. Many people swear by them, but I found them too barebones.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, they all work pretty seemlessly on 1-2year old hardware, which I presume developers are using as well.

On an old laptop I had, with a low end dual core AMD processor, low-end SSD and 4 Gigs of RAM, vim with LSP plugin was the only editor I could use very well. [1]

On a new laptop, I don't have issues with intellij and vscode so far. I get more features than the old setup and that's nice.

[1] - Of course LSP itself may consume some memory and performance. clangd, gopls etc.. worked well for me though.

I'm happy with VS Code for Python. It does everything I need and it's fast enough — never had any major bugs with it. I keep my setup simple though.

Vim with LSP (using CoC addon) is the most beautiful thing I could use to programming. It's the best part of VS Code with the best editor Vim.

I've mostly stopped caring about IDE capabilities. I'm good with having fast & precise text search, and a mostly working 'find definition'. A working source debugger is a plus, inserting prints & debug points is manageable. Even for git, I only use the IDE for 'resolve conflicts' because the JetBrains one is so good.

I think the opposite is true; I haven't experienced much if any bugs in VSCode (although it's a resource hog), and other editors including Neovim can get a ton of modern IDE-like functionality with LSP servers.

LSP has made it much easier to use something like Neovim instead of a big IDE without feeling like you're missing out on much.

I still use an IDE for work, and that's the only free Jetbrains product: Android Studio. Of course, I'm an Android dev.

Sometimes code in Go for backend dev. VSCode + a bunch of plugins work OK. Perhaps not super snappy like Sublime Editor, but still acceptable. BTW, I was a big Eclipse and Netbeans (for Java Swing) years ago.

> the only free Jetbrains product

Patently false: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

imo, you have misunderstood. op was saying that they only use one of Jetbrains IDEs (Android studio) and only the free-version. The article "the" was misplaced.

Maybe im smoothbrained but VSCode works great for me and I mainly write Go. Lots of co-workers use GoLand and are very happy with it. A few are using vim and among those three I wonder what you are looking for? What bugs did you enounter with Vscode that made it unusable for you?

Well, there could be room for another competitor in the IDE space, though tbh Jetbrains and VSCode are doing a pretty good job on the whole. As for text editors ... well, there are a lot of really viable options out there, including, of course, Emacs and Vim, etc.

I don't see any crisis.

JetBrains IDEs do everything I want them to do, and on my 16-core Ryzen with 64GB of RAM, they feel as fluid as touching water. I tried recording things in slow motion with my phone and I'm pretty confident that my keyboard to screen latency is <20 ms. Nvidia gpu, 144hz screen, Debian

That said, I did spend some time with their performance profiler after installing it and I generously increased IDE RAM limits.

We do have a monopoly, though. Pretty much everyone I know uses JetBrains CLion. But before that, everyone was on Visual Studio. So this effective monopoly has been around for 20 years, but we switched winners in between.

Is it VSCode for Go which is buggy (It's a Пoogle extension), or is it VSCode which is buggy? If you use neovim, you use gopls, right, is it less buggy there?

Yes, VSCode for Go is buggy. Often requires a reload too see a new package.

But how do you fix it on nvim? I.e ut should use the same lsp as vscode.

I think the problem is in the VSCode Go extension. I use vim-go and have no problems.

CodeRunner's pretty great as both a text editor and fairly comprehensive IDE for many languages. Its on Mac tho might not be helpful

I took it for a brief spin, but pitched it as soon as I realized it doesn’t have a “project” concept (or any documentation worth mentioning).

It’s a pity, because some of the other features seemed interesting, but not actually usable as an IDE.

If VS Code is sufficient, emacs or a vim derivative is probably better. If it's not, Jetbrains is the only game in town these days.

Eclipse seems to still be popular in some places.

What do you mean jetbrains is too resource heavy? What’s the specs of the computer where you noticed the slowdown?

I keep using IDE as usual, what crisis?

Yes. Frustration. Stick with nvim :)

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