Wow, this really sucks. With all the money flocking to companies that trained LLMs on stolen data, we may lose the only set of IDEs that offer high quality professional development tools
Zed in particular, from the way it was described upon release, sounded like it should have been a JB competitor. Reality: It can't even move functions or structs!
At least, that was so in dynamic languages, like Python, and PHP, last I checked.
That's always been my experience. Not even close. One gives you legos that lets you make a plastic toy, and the other is an industrial machine shop for code.
I thought maybe I was holding VSCode wrong, though.
Likewise (Same with zed). I've given them a thorough try several times, assuming I was holding it wrong as you say based on conversations with others who use them effectively. I've reached the conclusion you say here each time.
I don't want to spend a lot of time finding, installing, and configuring the right combination of plugins to bring VS Code up to Webstorm level.
Also, I don't trust plugin/extension marketplaces anymore. There is lower exposure in having fewer dependencies.
I use Rider but need VS for some things.
But there's plenty of examples.
For languages like kotlin, java and even python JB is still way ahead of the competition.
vscodium[0] might require some aftermarket bells and whistles to reach feature parity with jetbrains' "swiss army kitchen sink" approach but at least vscodium is not data-mining me.
A year or two ago, I finally gave up:
1. The IDE was simply too slow - notably slower and "heavier" than VS Code in particular - and it seemed to regularly get slower.
2. Bugs - from the complex (TypeScript constructs that tsc itself handles just fine while WebStorm's code analysis kept throwing false positives on) to the trivial and silly (failing to properly handle the <col> tag in React), and often staying open for years.
Meanwhile, VS Code just kept getting better, addressing the complaints I had with it while staying fast.
I work almost exclusively in TypeScript these days; as other commenters pointed out, I'm sure that JetBrains products are still great for other languages.
And their refactoring tools remain second to none. I'm profoundly disappointed in our industry that the VS Code developers apparently looked at JetBrains, with its arsenal of expertly crafted, deterministic, testable refactorings, and said, "Nope, we'd rather make everyone use inherently random language models for anything more complex than Rename Symbol."
The remote dev story is bad, it won't play nice with Nix environments, and high DPI support on Linux kept breaking on every other update.
I still miss the Git client sometimes, but Jujutsu has filled the gap.
The redesign they've gone for also seems like a supremely weird choice. It's like they're trying to be more like VS Code, when their probably biggest selling point was that unlike VS Code, they offered a full and traditional IDE experience.
Their trajectory has been a deeply questionable mix of change for the sake of change and nervously doing what everyone else is doing.
One such thing that Xcode has that IntelliJ doesn’t is per-pane history. In Xcode hitting back/forward navigates history for your focused editor pane whereas IntelliJ’s navigates history across all editor panes.
This might sound like a minor difference, but Xcode’s way gets me to where I want to go more quickly most of the time because I’m not having to wade through the likely-irrelevant history of the other panes. It’s a frequent frustration whenever I have to use an IntelliJ IDE.
Jumping through a stack of functions across classes and back seems like the most common case to me. I'm glad you like it but I would hate that.
The best thing to do would be to make it a checkbox, like IntelliJ does for almost everything else, but not that for some reason.
Microsoft's stuff is quite good, or you've got a really high bar.
> quite good
Good one.
Microsoft has had a very long reputation (for good reason) for having good developer tooling, even if Windows was not particularly developer friendly...