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Comment by nkmnz | Hacker News Reader

What functionality or property makes JetBrains' products an IDE while VSCode isn't? Honest question, I've never used any of their products.

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Paid JetBrains user here. What JetBrains gives you is self-implemented add-ons in their marketplace. These are perceived to have the same level of trust as the base product. Then there is the similar level of “might be malware” or “steal your infoware” from (possibly adapted) open source and third parties available on their marketplace.

As a example: Rider (https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/) - a IDE - comes with everything you could possibly need to build and compile .NET apps out of the box, while VSCode - a code editor - relies on extensions (and thus mostly the community surrounding VSCode) for this.

Or to make things more succinct:

* VSCode is a extendable code editor (like vim, neovim, Zed and Sublime)

* Jetbrains Rider is a fully equipped Integrated Development Environment (like Microsoft Visual Studio or its direct sibling Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA)

And while extensions are optional within a IDE (and often solely used for increased productivity), more often than not they are a necessity in a code editor to even become productive.

I'm a big JetBrains fan, but this distinction is just silly. If you look at the way that JetBrains IDEs are packaged, the differences between IDEs all come down to extensions—which are enabled by default, which are available to install at all. IntelliJ Ultimate can be made to have all the features of PyCharm with the right extension combo. And occasionally they break out a new IDE by taking an extension and making it no longer available for installation elsewhere (like RustRover). The entire architecture is one of plugins.

"Integrated" isn't meant to contrast with a plugin-based system (otherwise JetBrains wouldn't count!), it's meant to contrast with a dev environment built out of a bunch of individual tools and terminal commands run separately.

Good point. In the old times if someone had Eclipse but installed plugins for different language than Java we wouldn't suddenly downgrade Eclipse that it is a text editor.

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