Hacker News Reader

Comment by zenocon | Hacker News Reader

Why do they insist on a separate heavyweight installation for each functional area / language? IDEA (Java), PhpStorm, RubyMine, PyCharm, AppCode, WebStorm, and now 0xDBE? What if you were building something that used all of those? You'd be buying a license for 7 IDEs? What happened to the good 'ol plugin model?

I still prefer the lightweight Sublime Text to having to install all these monolithic Java-based IDEs, but I agree that the SQL/DBA tools have sucked for a long time -- especially a good cross-platform tool. Valentina Studio was the best I've found http://www.valentina-db.com/en/valentina-studio-overview -- has support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, and their own proprietary db.

View on HN

If you prefer the good ol' plugin model then you can buy IntellijIDEA and install all the language/platform specific plugins that you want.

One catch is that IntellijIDEA license costs about 2x the price of specialized IDE for your favourite platform.

The other catch is that JetBrains has individual teams for individual IDEs and thus IndellijIDEA plugins lag a bit behind the specialized solutions.

No need to get all worked up.

The plugins are not the same as the IDEs. For example PyCharm doesn't distinguish between project settings and IDE settings the way IntelliJ does. The UI for choosing your python version and virtualenv is baked right into the IDE settings where as that is not the case when you install the Python plugin in IntelliJ. The .idea directories also do not seem to be compatible across RubyMine and IntelliJ. I have mistakenly opened up the wrong project with RubyMine and it scrambled the .idea for a non-ruby project.

The same is true with WebStorm, the UI and features found in WebStorm are not the same as in the JavaScript plugin. You cannot buy IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate and get all the features of all the other IDEs, you need to have separate licenses.

Indeed. Working with a Python (Django) project in IntelliJ IDEA is downright annoying: project setup is hard, and the Java stuff haunts you everywhere. While it's better than plain old Notepad, I can't recommend it for anything but the odd side project.

Another annoyance is they do not offer the database functionality in IntelliJ on WebStorm. The database plugins that can be installed on WebStorm are geared towards MySQL and Oracle. I use Postgres.

I wonder if it's worth trying to crowd fund a JavaScript IDE based on atom.

> You'd be buying a license for 7 IDEs? What happened to the good 'ol plugin model?

+1, it's ridiculous. My colleague switches between PhpStorm and IDEA depending upon which language she is writing in, so it's two licenses for us to absorb. I only use IDEA because doing Java without an IDE is painful, for everything else I use Sublime.

* edit for grammer

She doesn't need to be. Idea includes the PHP plugin which is basically PHPStorm thats lags a bit (usually negligibly)...

The licences are far cheaper than your colleague's time.

I used to have licenses for IntelliJ, RubyMine, and PyCharm. The customized IDEs are nicer to use: feels more light weight.

Now, I just use IntelliJ for the occasional Clojure and Java. If I need RubyMine or PyCharm, I just use the old versions I am licensed for.

If I was actively using Python and Ruby then I would keep the licenses up to date - well worth it.

> What if you were building something that used all of those? You'd be buying a license for 7 IDEs? What happened to the good 'ol plugin model?

We actually buy a license for each of these editors. We test our Floobits plugin for IntelliJ in each of these editors and they are significantly different enough that you should really have a copy of each. They also have different build numbers and different jar libraries included. This means there are differences in the code base and that could affect a plugin you might be building.

For example PyCharm ships with apache java libraries we also ship, and we used to have conflicts when PyCharm had a really old version. The different build numbers indicate different points of history in the IntelliJ code base. Some crucial plugin API may be in one build but not another.

Thankfully Jetbrains gave us a steep discount for the licenses to help us out. But even if I were not editing a plugin for Floobits I would still have to buy a license for PyCharm, WebStorm and IntelliJ separately because the Python and JavaScript plugins for IntelliJ do not have all the features the separate IDEs have.

I took a long time to setup Django and virtualenvs correctly so I can run and debug Floobits.com in PyCharm, I don't see any easy way to translate that work from PyCharm to IntelliJ with the Python plugin. Same with WebStorm. Many of our services are written in node.js and translating my setup from WebStorm to the IntelliJ plugin with JavaScript doesn't seem easy to do or even possible. It might just be I have no idea what I'm doing.

I'm a big fan of IntelliJ, I'm not sure I agree w/ this - though it might be specific to your use case.

Can you note some specific features that are missing? I understand if one application requires a different way of doing something, but that doesn't necessary mean that functionality is missing or different.

One big set of features missing are the configuration options available in PyCharm. For example being able to configure Vagrant in PyCharm provides its own UI in the IDE settings. I have created a screenshot showing all the various PyCharm setting views compared to IntelliJ with the Python Plugin installed:

http://imgur.com/tKFnnkj.png

You can actually get some of the Vagrant features with a separate Vagrant plugin in IntelliJ, but PyCharm lets you set up the Python interpreter with Vagrant via a really nice UI.

Of course, that makes sense. That feature is under the Remote Interpreter in IntelliJ. Vagrant configurations can change between modules, which is why it's organized under IntelliJ under module settings -> SDKs.

So that falls under "hidden under a different area" in the IntelliJ project, not missing functionality.

The concept of modules in IntelliJ is not in PyCharm, I believe. Though, I could be wrong.

Their premium product intellij does have plugins that replicate the support of their standalone IDEs apart from I think AppCode. Not sure about the status of this.

This isn't the case actually. These plugins offer only a subset of the features of the various IDEs.

I think there are a lot of reasons, IDEA is a universal app that can't necessarily fit the workflow of every language perfectly whereas something like PHPStorm, it's pretty obviously supporting the technologies and tooling associated with a PHP app. I used WebStorm and PHPStorm for a while and finally bit the bullet and purchased IDEA because I develop in Java, PHP, Perl, Python and Node.js regularly enough that I'd prefer one IDE to rule them all. IDEA seems to prefer Java first though, whereas when I created a new project in PHPStorm it gave me prompts that would be (as you'd expect) much more relevant for a PHP app. Also, the cost is a factor- PHPStorm or WebStorm are significantly cheaper than IDEA- if I was had a primary dev stack that fit in one of the 'smaller' IDEs they provide, I'd be thankful that I was able to buy something less than the Cadillac IDE offering. Sidenote: I find IDEA to be a fantastic IDE and replaced Komodo ($200+) and Eclipse (free) with one that is much easier to use.

Along those same lines, why would a DBA want to pop for everything that IDEA supports when their primary goal is writing SQL?

Probably trying to stay distinct from Eclipse. Over a few years on the same computer, my Eclipse install would have dozens of plugins and take longer and longer to start up and have context menus a mile long. I think it makes good sense to draw a line somewhere.

At the moment all the 0xdbe functionality is available in IntelliJ IDEA and other IntelliJ-based IDEs via built-in plugins.

Actually most of those support most of the other features / languages via plugins. But they try to really emphasize and target the language specific IDE's towards that language itself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com