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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

OK, cheating a bit here, but: My Jetbrains IDEs. It's a huge productivity boost for me over VSCode, with batteries included out of the box (great diff engine, gitlens like visual git, built in postman like client, SQL query editor and table browser, amazing indexed searched, awesome refactoring). I've paid for an individual sub for a decade and will probably keep doing it for life. Really great product that's useful every hour of the workday, no matter how I sit or stand.

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I only use DataGrip, but oh boy is that the best $8 a month that my employer pays for. I'd pay an absurd amount out of pocket per month for DG alone. Easily $100 probably.

I've used so many SQL GUIs and DataGrip is better than all of them in every way. From the top notch intellisense to the great GUI with safe and commitable changes, there's just so much that blows everyone else out of the water. I spent two years at one job settling for SequelPro, an old freeware MacOS SQL client. What the hell was wrong with me? For $8 a month, I could have felt much more comfortable and been more effective in my development.

I wish I could use DataGrip. I work in health IT but the database is over 1 TB and literally has over 1 thousand tables. DataGrip basically crashes.

I refunded my purchase.

Why is it loading all the tables at once? Just trying to list them all crashed it, you mean?

I finally switched to using Jetbrains IDEs after using vim for so many decades.

I am curious how you went about learning all the features. There just seems to be so many and it can be a bit overwhelming.

I'm sure I still don't know them all! I just learn them as I need to. Like "how to revert a commit Jetbrains" or "Jetbrains query postgres" or "copilot for Jetbrains", etc.

Really 95% of the time I'm just using the code editor, intellisense, and search everywhere (shift shift shift). I'm glad the other features are there but it's totally fine to slowly discover them.

I think by default it also launches with a tip of the day feature, which you can manually browse through to see many of the tricks.

I feel like using IntelliJ for Java really made me like the process of writing code more, as opposed to having used Eclipse in the past. This was way before VS Code was a thing, to be fair. Now I have VS Code and I tried Cursor, but I keep coming back JetBrains IDEs for development.

I’ve become very dependent on it too and slowly transitioning to nvim for everything. Want to avoid having to pay the subscription

I understand trying to save money, but the individual licenses are really fairly priced. For a single IDE (like Webstorm) it's $69/year for the first year, then $41/year from year 3 and on. That's <$4/mo. And you can write it all off as a business expense.

For the price of a coffee (and maybe a bagel) once a month, you get access to something that can save you hours a week. And if you ever stop subscribing, you can keep using the last licensed version you have, just without further upgrades. I don't think there is a better value anywhere in the software world. It costs even less (and gives way more) than MS Office.

If you need more than one IDE, it's more expensive, but still not bad at all. They also give free licenses to FOSS maintainers, along with significant discounts for startups, education, nonprofits, etc.

You make a good point and I agree 100%; itinerant very reasonably priced. I realize that my comment only highlighted the price being the only factor in my decision to move to other editor. It’s really more like 10% of the reason. My main reason is not having my development experience tied to a single non-open source product. Jetsbrains + ideavim lead to a very highly customizable experience (things like quick lists, triggering ide menu options from ideavim bindings, etc) however it’s still not as configurable as the open source alternatives. Plus I get the benefit of not leaving the shell. This, the price and several other reasons led me to commit to it (another big reason is that it’s just plain fun; the things you can build\come up with to speed your development experience is honestly more of a hobby at this point. So it’s not even about the speed to get things done but something that’s just very enjoyable)

I currently have 5 different JetBrains products open. I am very happy to pay my annual license for their products :)

100% agreed, Jetbrain IDEs are great buys, but some people refuse to make the leap. I'm currently running into formatting issues/PR conflicts because of other devs refusing to switch over and the default formatting rules between Code and Jetbrains is wide.

I think the best solution is to settle for a third party formatter.

Oh, yeah, we had that issue too and solved it pretty successfully with `.editorconfig` (shareable between VScode and IntelliJ, https://editorconfig.org/) combined with `prettier`.

Each IDE is configured to:

- Not reformat code on its own

- Ignore whitespace

- Run `prettier` as a pre-commit hook

Those settings are saved to `.editorconfig` where possible, or to each IDE's repo-specific folder (e.g. `.idea`).

Then in theory each developer can use whatever IDE they want, whatever whitespace settings they want (tabs vs spaces), and the end code committed to the repo is still the same. It took a commit or three to set up and work out all the kinks, but afterward it ran flawlessly.

I've suggested that twice now, but it's a couple of the more senior members on the team being resistant, so the feet dragging continues.

Don't worry, one day soon you'll become the senior and pass along the torment with your favorite code styles :) And thus the cycle continues...

I can't wait to mandate tabs over spaces, haha :D.

What environmnts are you using it for ? I guess it shines more on languages other than webdev/react...

I enjoy it, but don't feel that many advantages over VSCode for my flow. (unfortuntely)

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