So far, it seems like they're very slowly recreating their IDEs from scratch in Fleet while continuing development on the IntelliJ Platform and related IDEs, doing twice as much work for nothing.
I love and use Jetbrains IDEs every day, but after a decade I still only find their UIs merely tolerable. Many of my colleagues try them out for an hour or two and then jump ship back to VSCode just because the initial "wtf is going on" factor is so high =/
I'm guessing Fleet was their answer, an opportunity to develop a greenfield UI for a new generation of devs raised with UX (vs the old guard of IntelliJ users from past decades). It made sense, until AI suddenly took over everything and nobody cared what your IDE UI is like anymore.
They're also now intent on destroying them in favor of the "new" primitive UI by trying to cater to new users (who are seemingly fine with never becoming power users). The good UI is still available through a plugin, but it's obvious it will be dropped in the next few years. I'm pretty sure they will lose the old guard like me right after that.
I am a power user of my tools. It is sad when a tool gets simplified and have configurations deleted, it is like getting rid of "Advanced" option, essentially.
Maybe my one main complaint is the side panes. I still loathe the hieroglyphic buttons. I would love a return to the sensible vertical text labels… but even then I realize I never change the order of those panes, so it’s not like I’m ever unsure of which pane is which at this point.
It feels… perfectly cromulent. I don’t really care at this point, if it helps new folks use IDEA IDEs, cool. Doesn’t affect my life at all now. And that’s coming from someone that does actually use the useful features of an IDE, and has been for a long time.
I get trying to be minimalist but the VCS icons are really useful because they also convey if something has not been pushed / pulled yet.
Now, there's the classic plugin but it's got an expiration date. I also could get used to all of this, and I did, I migrated to VSCode. It has a surprising (yet hilariously complex) amount of theming options and I got the contrast to previous JB defaults. Because Jetbrains' communication has been just awful throughout this change these past couple of years, I just don't trust them anymore to not destroy my workflow on a whim, it's a portent of enshittification.
I also don't think that's some obscure hypothesis on my part. It was just the zeitgeist at the time Fleet first came out (https://developers.slashdot.org/story/21/12/04/1655249/jetbr...)... seemed obvious that it was to counter VSCode. Fleet's own homepage says "We envisioned Fleet as a coding tool with a clear minimalist design that doesn’t overwhelm and helps keep you focused."
I'm not trying to convince anyone that one look & feel is better than another, just point out that there IS a generational divide (my guess) or at least a divide (of SOME sort) between those who prefer dense UIs and those who prefer simpler ones. My younger coworkers especially seem to struggle with the full-blown IntelliJ – it's just a trend I noticed, not some deep scholarly analysis. It's part of a generational fashion trend towards more whitespace and less information density.
Jetbrains already risked quite a flame war when they launched the "simplified UI" for IntelliJ, to a very mixed love-it-or-hate-it reception. They realized they couldn't change the existing UI too much without alienating some % of their existing users. So Fleet was a way to instead make an alternative, sharing some of the same backend but with a different enough UI for those who want it.
I doubt it's ever going to replace the traditional IntelliJ UI, especially now that they're refocusing efforts on AI stuff instead of minimalist UIs.
I've only recently started using JetBrains, so I'm only familiar with the new UI but I distinctly feel like I don't know what I'm missing on extra functions because I'm just not aware of it existing
Don't worry, I've been using it for 10+ years and I still feel that way every day :)
But also objectively.
Who should I take seriously now? The "power users" who claim that vim with lsp and terminal is the way, or the "power users" who claim that bloated UIs is the way?
As far as I am concerned, "power users" only really need the functionality to be there and accessible with a command palette, do away with "power users" panels and buttons please.
Typically if this happens I notice IDEA is indexing the entire dependency tree for something like node or python. It'll have an understanding of everything but is much slower to index and typically not needed. If you exclude node_modules you'll have very fast time once again
Compare that with the other main IDE I use, Visual Studio. It works great.
That's on you. What it comes with is great. And there's a huge selection of good third party plugins if one takes attention to what they install.
There is a whole nother discussion about "progressive discovery" of functionality which I think is actually wrong although that would be a fringe view among "UX" specialists.
Jetbrains IDEs go pretty fast when the JVM running them is switched over to the ZGC garbage collector, and by making sure the Metal or Vulkan renderer are being used. (And DirectX on Windows? idk?)
The difference is pretty stark. ZGC is Verygood. Everything is very responsive. This is not an “enterprisey” JVM GC that takes ages to spin up for throughput. It’s quick.
The whole IDE starts up in like 1 second on my 2018 Intel i7 laptop?, including open projects and all. It’s wild how fast IntelliJ can get – and it’s also kinda wild how much performance they leave on the table with the default options.
It’s an easy config change in the .vmoptions file.
I think on macOS the Metal GPU-accelerated UI rendering is the default these days. On Linux you need to opt in to the Vulkan equivalent. It’s still a bit unrefined but worth it even now.
ZGC is a much bigger difference though. Try it!!!
Seems like some things become faster while other things become slower? https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IJPL-1284/Increase-defa...
–Thanks for the link!
I only notice things getting much quicker, fwiw. I do habitually throw resources at the IDE as mentioned in the next Youtrack comment down.
I pay for them primarily to save me from LSP, which they do for many languages, though the Elixir plugin is not by Jetbrains (but it actually predates LSP itself).
People can rag on Electron apps all they like, but VSCode on modern hardware is very snappy. Jetbrains is a noticeable downgrade.
It's not Sublime Text fast, for sure.
VSCode is anyway running either Netbeans or Eclipse headless for its Java support, better use the real deal.
It’s definitely not as fast to load etc as say sublime, but it’s an IDE not an editor.
Sure indexing a new project takes a while and things will be sluggish at first but once it done, it works great. And you can easily edit huge files, like seriously huge files without problems, even the search will work smoothly. Basically the Java school of performance, absolute resources hog but scales very well.
For me vscode is intolerably slow. Sure it starts up quickly but the editing experience is absolutely infuriating. I had projects that I could not work with in vscode because a few thousand lines of code in a file were already too much for it.
I haven't tried Fleet but that could be part of it
Now I use Zed, which seems to be what Fleet should have been.
Some of us love this UI.
Xcode has its own share of weaknesses, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I’m irritated more frequently by quirks of IntelliJ IDEs like how the sidebar palettes work in a way that they’re constantly at battle with each other and how super simple considerations like per-editor-pane back/forward/history are missing. They sometimes feel like they trip over the basics in pursuit of fancy gizmos.
It has all the same UI problems I remember of their other IDEs like WebStorm. Clunky and weird looking, and that’s coming from someone that appreciates generally Windows 9x style controls and palette, JetBrains just can’t get it right.
As a side note one of the advertised features of DataGrip is its AI/LLM features which I thought was kind of cool after dealing with a terribly designed and legacy database; LLMs have really helped with refactoring.
So once I got a license for DataGrip and then opened it the AI tool was no where to be seen. I had to go read the docs page online to find out I have to install the extension myself. Weird.
The advertised AI feature is… behind another paywall with a seven day trial. Hang on, I just got DataGrip for its “included” AI support and you want to charge me for it anyway?
I’m glad I got the license for free via their OSS support, but would I have bothered if I knew one of the main features is actually a separate paid feature? Probably not.
I would have love it though ;)
People who get hung up on the aesthetics of their IDEs are going to have other problems with programming generally.
Really?
I mean, the UIs are basically the same now. I have them open side by side on my desktop right now and they're both:
- black boxes with a panel on the left of icons, then a tree of files, then a tabbed pane of open files.
- clicking on the icons on the left opens some obscure subwindow depending on you magically knowing what the icon means.
The only meaningful difference is that in vscode there's a command palette at the top where you can type in random stuff and get a list of actions, and in intellij you have to 'know' that the shortcut for that is 'press shift 3 times' instead of 'shift control p'
...but I mean, thats it; they're otherwise pretty much identical, practically.
Honestly, anyone who opens intellij and then goes back to vscode because its too different is a numpty.
Things work differently, and people don't like different things, and if they go back because it was different or the shortcuts are different, that's fair. It is disruptive.
...but, because the 'wtf is going on' factor is too high? Realllllllly? What does that even mean?
Come on. They're not that different. If clicking on 'run' on the top right instead of on the left bar is too 'wtf', you really haven't made a real effort to try using the other IDE.
(The same goes for old school intellij users who try vscode and then run away. Give it a decent shot before you walk away because it's too hard if the only hard thing is your keyboard shortcut muscle memory... vscode is pretty great)
You only really see the deep differences when you use them extensively for things like refactoring and debugging.
IntelliJ ships a “VSCode” keymap in the product that you can switch to with one option in the settings.
Maybe things have changed since then, no idea.
My main reason for using JB is I loathe the shitty build your own ide experience of VSC. Everything is more difficult, whereas in JB everything just works.
Also, with a rewrite I've hoped that remote development will be less buggy than it currently is with Goland. It's laggy too and you see weird screen flashes. Sometimes certain features don't even work over remote.
I haven't tried again to see if newer versions have fixed the issue.
KMP support was the only reason I was still curious about Fleet. I presume this announcement is the beginning of the end for Fleet.
There was really no reason for ST users to switch to VSC other than better tool integration.
Winning people over from VSC means having a free and fast editor with great features and lots of useful plugins. Still a long way to go.
They don't necessarily need to exactly know what it is, perhaps is just Jetbrains hedging their bets.