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Comment by chronofar | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the newly introduced Fleet the other commenter pointed out, Jetbrains' IDEA Ultimate can include all the functionality of all the individual niche products (via plugins), so you could just use a single Jetbrains IDE for most any language/flow you choose. I personally kind of like to keep them separate so I can keep different envs configured the way I most often use them, but you could just use the single IDE for all.

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I thought it was weird when Jetbrains started to split up their product into language-specific products, but given how many people say they use WebStorm or an other niche product, and who say they use multiple, I can't blame Jetbrains - I think that in hindsight it was a great business move. An expensive "I can do everything" product has a higher barrier to entry than a specialized product.

Personally I've been using Ultimate on and off over the years, since I've never really stuck to any one language; at my previous job it was a mix of PHP / JS (Dojo), Go, Typescript, and sometimes (reading) C code which didn't quite work right in Ultimate.

VS Code can do all that too, but only intellij was able to actually help me with stuff - things like set the version of PHP to 5.2 so it warns me if I tried to use the PHP 5.3 array shorthand. (I did not choose PHP by the way and the project was to replace it)

> I thought it was weird when Jetbrains started to split up their product into language-specific products

They're for different audiences; the hurdle of trying to explain to a JS dev "yeah, I know when it starts up it asks for a Maven/Gradle/JVM, but just ignore that and open a directory after you install the following 8 plugins" is bad DX. As others have said, the standalone products are not feature parity with the IJ plugins. I have no idea why that is, or what incentives are driving that, but for the time being it is what it is

> the standalone products are not feature parity with the IJ plugins.

Probably to sell their more expensive "all access pass" instead of just one IDE that does everything.

Can confirm... IDEA Ultimate (and Community to a lesser extent) lets me write code in Java, Groovy, Kotlin (and with slightly fewer features, but still really good support), Go, Rust, JavaScript, TypeScript, and of course, HTML/CSS... probably more but those are what I normally use.

VS Code is getting support for all the newer languages though... similar to how it used to be before with Eclipse (for those who remember the multitude of Eclipse-based IDEs for niche uses in the 2000's) and emacs (which still gets support for most esoteric langs, even if half baked, pretty quickly)... for example, I can use Zig in both emacs and VS Code, but not IntelliJ (I think they are writing one , but it was really unusable when I last checked it out). And stuff like Julia, Common Lisp.... I tend to go to emacs for those... but apparently supporting VS Code is high priority for even these languages nowadays.

I wonder how do you manage so my languages without getting confused?

I don't use them all at the same time :D sometimes I might go for months without touching some of them but I always find an excuse to go back so I don't lose the knowledge. No particular reason to try to keep up with many languages, I just enjoy it.

No you can't, because JetBrains refuses to have Clion plugins into InteliJ, it is the only Java IDE that doesn't support mixed language development.

C/C++ is only 'one language' (I know, but for sake of this discussion, may as well be), and even then, Intellij does just fine for me, even if it's not on par with Clion. To say it doesn't support mixed language development is silly. In one sizeable project I have python, js, TS, kotlin, Java, bash, groovy, even a little C. All of it works in Intellij ultimate with code completion, refactoring, goto definition, find usages, etc. And it does it does better and faster than the same project when attempting to use VSCode. VSCode starts getting real slow trying to find references and whatnot on significant size projects, and the refactoring is night and day better in Intellij.

Since when does InteliJ support JNI debugging?!?

Android Studio's C++ support is done by Google's own licensed CLion for integrating it into a proper development experience.

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