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Comment by LeafItAlone | Hacker News Reader

A bit off topic: For work I mostly develop on Python and Typescript.

I’ve been using PyCharm Professional for over a decade (after an even longer time with emacs).

I keep trying to switch to vscode, Cursor, etc. as they seem to be well liked by their users.

Recently I’ve also tried Zed.

But the Jetbrains suite of tools for refactoring, debugging, and general “intelligence” keep me going back. I know I’m not the only one.

For those of you that love these vscode-like editors that have previously used more integrated IDEs, what does your setup look like?

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Important not - you should not assume Zed is on par with vscode in terms of functionality. Nothing really is as MS started as early as Atom was born, and perhaps they were considering some SublimeText approach to the editior, as it is what started these type of editors more or less.

But Zed is a complete rewrite, which on one hand makes itsuper-fast, but otherwise is still super-lacking of integration with the existing vsix extensions, language servers, and what not. Many authors in this forum totally fail to see that SublimeText4 is super ultra fast also compared to Electron-based editors, but is not even close in terms of supported extensions.

The whole Cursor hysteria may abruptly end with CoPilot/Cline/Continue advancing, and honestly, havng used both - there isnt much difference in the final result, should you know what you are doing.

I use both Zed and JB. The thing with the jetbrains stuff is (1) it costs money and (2) you only need the fancy refactoring features occasionally. With modern LSP you can “find usages” and “goto definition” and you get live symbol completion and documentation in Zed just as naturally as JB. Zed covers 98% of your editing needs. A proper Debugger would be awesome, I use JB for debugging every time.

I work with PHP and even the commercial LSPs are not even remotely up to par with PhpStorm’s capabilities.

I've ended up using aider with pycharm, it's not as feature rich as cursor but works great for me

https://aider.chat/docs/usage/watch.html

Not exactly answering your question, but as a user of JetBrains IDEs the Windsurf Plugin with Cascade[0] for JB IDEs is the best solution I've found so far to get a good agentic AI integration without giving up JetBrains goodies.

[0] https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/20540-windsurf-plugin-f...

Yup. Can't give up Jetbrains. When you want to automate a task, you can reach for claude code.

I've been using PyCharm for the debugger (and everything else) and VSCode + RooCode + Local LLM lately.

I've heard decent things about the Windsurf extension in PyCharm, but not being able to use a local LLM is an absolute non-starter for me.

I had the same problem, very hard to give up Jetbrains functionality and keybindings.

At the moment I’m using Claude Code in a dedicated terminal next to my Jetbrains IDE and am reasonably happy with the combination.

same for me with intellij idea for scala and java

I was a RubyMine and later IDEA user for many many years. I agree with everything you've said but I got so tired of the IDE using excessive RAM and constantly making my fan spin (2019 Intel MBP). Switching to Zed made my experience on this laptop enjoyable again, the downside being that I miss out on some of the features from the JetBrains editors.

I've learned to work around the loss of some functionality over the past 6 months since I've switched and it hasn't been too bad. The AI features in Zed have been great and I'm looking forward to the debugger release so I can finally run and debug tests in Zed.

> (2019 Intel MBP)

I used to have one of these and recently got an M1 Max machine - the performance boost is seriously incredible.

The throttling on those late-game intel macs is hardcore - at one point I downloaded Hot[1], which is a menu bar app that shows you when you're being throttled. It was literally all the time that the system was slowing itself down due to heat. I eventually just uninstalled it because it was a constant source of frustration to know I was only ever getting 50% performance out of my expensive dev laptop.

[1]: https://github.com/macmade/Hot

I got an M4 as a new work machine and it is absolutely bonkers how much faster and quieter it is. And the battery lasts forever, even when running my dev setup. I can actually go and work at a coffee shop for a couple hours without taking the charger now.

Same here. My slightly older M2 MacBook Air seems to be allergic to electricity. I wouldn't be afraid of leaving the house without a charger before a full day's work, as long as I'm not planning to run compute-heavy stuff the entire time.

prbaly not solution you are looking for but try m1 machines. 'my ide is too big for my laptop' is a thing of the past.

Same. I use IntelliJ for actual coding and cursor for when I need to automate something

It's pretty tough to give up the good things that Jetbrains IDEs can bring, when they exist for a given lang. The obvious example is Java - IntelliJ is just leaps and bounds better than whatever stack of plugins you need in VSCode (or Cursor).

This isn't a great solution, but in cases where I've wanted to try out Cursor on a Java code base, I just open the project in both IDEs. I'll do AI-based edits with Cursor, and if I need to go clean them up or, you know, write my own code, I'll just switch over to IntelliJ.

Again, that's not the smoothest solution, but the vast majority of my work lately has been in Javascript, so for the occasional dip into Java-land, "dual-wielding" IDEs has been workable enough.

Cursor/Code handle JS codebases just fine - Webstorm is a little better maybe, but not the "leaps and bounds" difference between Code and IntelliJ - so for JS, I just live in Cursor these days.

Java is the original “it needs an ide” language. Always has been. If you’re not using jetbrains, eclipse, or whatever other monstrosity to write Java you’re going to have a bad time. I wouldn’t consider this a mark against Zed, I’d wager very few people write Java it.

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