Hacker News Reader

Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

Alternatively, why would I want to use Jetbrains over VSCode?

Depends on the language you use really.

CLion is the best cross platform C++ and Rust IDE there is imho. Everything from target management, to debugging integration and integration with CMake (no having to go back and forth with generated projects) is so head and shoulders above alternatives.

Rider is similarly so well tuned to game development needs. There’s tons of quality of life features in the IDE for Unity and Unreal developers.

PyCharm Pro has great multi language support within a single file which is great for web frameworks, and an integrated database inspector too.

But I’d go back to the : “why would I want to use X over Y?”

I use both. VS Code for small projects and quick edits. Jetbrains for larger projects where I need the better tooling like inspection and refactoring. They’re complementary.

That said, I don’t think I’d be anywhere near as efficient a dev if I didn’t have my Jetbrains stuff on hand. I could replace VS Code with any number of smart text editors like sublime or fleet instead.

I used CLion for the longest time but it's just so sticky and slow. VSCode with the clangd plugin is blazing fast.

> I use both.

I mostly don't get the all chips in a single IDE people. None of them are perfect for everything. Be glad there are options and use what works best for you for the task at hand!

Like with everything, you can either learn a bunch of tools on the surface or only a few of them deeply. And there's quite a lot of depth to the JetBrains tools.

I use mostly CLion, PyCharm and Android Studio from JetBrains. I get what you mean, but about depth and getting really good with a single tool, most of time I have more success in this with command line tools, as their interface almost never changes, the knowledge can pile up in little steps.

With graphical UIs (hi Xcode) I mostly don't see big benefits of getting that much of depth as productivity gains can be swiped off by software updates - or alternatively, by switching projects with different technologies.

Well, there's basically no alternative (CLI or otherwise) for the Java tooling with the quality Intellij provides ...

I don't think the Rust story is that simple. They've got the best Rust debugger, but I'm skeptical about their decision to build their own intellisense. Everyone else is using rust-analyzer, and r-a is getting better and better. Intellij Rust started off quite solid, but it's fallen behind in innovation.

Things like proper analysis of code in branches of the select macro matter a lot to me.

A serious alternative is neovim together with lsp plugins. You can set up a preconfigured neovim such as lunarvim and after learning a few shortcuts you are 90% the way what Clion offers. It isn't totally easy to get into it but at least for coding it is very productive. Debugging is another story I haven't really touched until now.

If you are happy with VSCode you probably aren't doing the things Jetbrains IDEs excel at.

That said: Language support - specifically Java and Kotlin are absolutely top tier. CLion is easily the best Rust IDE also. Automated refactorings. Really really fast code search - caveat, indexing takes a while but it's worth it.

My own anecdotal experience.

- VSCode plugins don't seem to work as well or feel as cohesive for the languages I typically use, Go, Python, Typescript.

- Jetbrains debugging is much better

- I like the look of Jetbrains IDEs much better

- One IDE custom fit to each language

- Great git integration

I pop in to VSCode from time to time and I always seem to return.

I've been developing a large Angular application and I got fed up with the flakiness of the Angular plugin in VSC. Sometimes jump to definition works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes error indicators are correct, sometimes they aren't.

With webstorm I don't have these problems. People will mock the indexing shenanigans of jetbrains IDEs but they get results. WebStorm can reliably refactor where I get anxious in VSC because it often misses some template references and webstorm's symbol search is reliable and fast.

It's a MUCH better debugger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBgLeRwjlAc

Reply on news.ycombinator.com