This looks really great, and nice to see both Github and Gitlab moving in this direction - ability to have IDE in the browser is great for many use-cases.
However, I am a bit worried that it looks like most of these companies and up using VSCode. It really needs to have a good competitor in this space, and I hope JetBrains can match that eventually with partnerships of their own.
The way that VS Code is spreading, and the stranglehold Microsoft has on development and direction of the product, give me very strong IE4/5/6 vibes. I really hope some of the open source alternatives that aren't corporation-controlled gain traction over the next year.
I moved from vim to VS code as I found the vim IDE experience slightly lacking. Recently I've found myself getting more and more fed up with how sluggish VS code feels.
With the push from a friend, I tried neovim with the requisite LS plugins and I'm never going back. It's lightning fast and has feature parity (at least the ones I use) with VS Code.
Its a bit of a bitch to setup, but there are preconfigured solutions out there (NVChad, LunarVim, AstroVim) if you want to skip all that bullshit and just get coding...
Seconded. Neovim with their built-in LSP is so good! Was a happy VSCode user for years but not very comfortable with how they’re starting to push more and more proprietary pieces, so started looking for alternatives. Neovim fits the bill perfectly.
Helix is another one to watch. Not quite at Neovim’s level and may need some reprogramming of the vim muscle memory but definitely promising!
NvChad is excellent. I recently finished converting my older .vimrc-based configuration to an entirely lua-based one on top of the base NvChad setup and it‘s just perfect.
Unlike IE, VS Code is open source though. If Microsoft does some terrible thing with VS Code, the community can just switch to VSCodium: https://vscodium.com/
It's not. VSC is a packaged version of the open-source code with proprietary bits added. Integration with the plugin marketplace, telemetry, etc. VSCodium does not have that.
In addition, a lot of the good language plugins are proprietary, like PyLance and the C# plugin.
This doesn't really match since the "Embrace" part is different.
The classic formula was "embracing" an established standard, making proprietary extensions to that standard, then using the adoption of those proprietary extensions to extinguish the original standard's market share.
In this case, Microsoft didn't embrace an existing code base or standard, they made one and open sourced it. What would the analagous "extinction" bere here? That they eventually stop releasing updates to VSCode as open source?
While I agree that there is good reason to doubt Microsoft's intention to be a good steward of an open source project, this seems less like another iteration of that playbook and more like what a lot of "open source" for-profit companies do where they have an open core but keep many features proprietary so they can't be easily forked.
It is quite easy to see that the "embrace" is to release a core into the open source world. They embraced the idea of open source and released something, they extended the user base into the world of the non-free option. The thinking is if they can get a critical mass of folks onto the option that is non-free, they will extinguish the free option by no longer supporting it.
And this is not much different from the things they did this with back in the day. Used to, you wouldn't target open source, as much as you would student audience. The battle used to be more over what corporate workforces would want and use. The open source development scene changed that a bit. Though, it is kind of... interesting to consider how many tools and ideas have been lost in that process.
> The thinking is if they can get a critical mass of folks onto the option that is non-free, they will extinguish the free option by no longer supporting it.
I assume you mean "non-free" as in speech, not beer, since VSCode is free. Hasn't that "critical mass" been the case since day one? I can't imagine that VSCodium built binaries have ever had more than a tiny fraction of the user-base of VSCode? Thus I don't see how "Extinquish" plays a role here.
I still think it makes more sense to think of the strategy as more akin to the FOSS-washing / freemium models used by many companies.
Yes, non-free as in speech. Though, if they were to flip it from the "beer" sense of the term, I'm not entirely clear that would make much difference. As long as they have tripped the critical mass of the userbase.
And it is very similar to the freemium models used by many companies. Apologies if I made that sound like a disagreement. I think the point was more that Microsoft doing it is part of their old game plan. Random companies acting in other means is a bit of a non-sequitur. That said, I think it is common idea that many other companies have tried to extinguish competition in their "free" market? That is, many companies do what they can to make it easy for hobbyists and such to use things for free, but as soon as you are in a company, they try to milk the company for fees.
There are several android distros that provide support for a de-googled installation. Calling it "impossible" seems like a bit of a stretch, though there are definitely limitations, even with microg installed.
I do think that the VSCode model is much more similar to the Android model (though Android is a more extreme version of the model) than either is to the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" model.
There is a difference, and that is that you can use something like Jetbrains and your coworker can use VSCode with issues, but if 99% of people use a browser that renders HTML/CSS differently (and I will argue better than the competition at the time) then you are forced to acquiesce to it.
What’s happening is teams will prioritize and prefer only VSCode. So while technically you can, may be, get Jetbrains to work, it’ll be subpar. After a while you just give up and switch to what everyone in the team uses. It’s already happening to me - my team uses VSCode and it comes with a nice devcontainer that’s fully configured. With Jetbrains I’m doing it all myself.
I randomly typed in the word "lines" into a pacman search and discovered the existence of the lines IDE [0]. Never heard it mentioned anywhere before. I know nothing about it, I was just experimenting with pacman search out of boredom.
Interestingly, Netbeans (though strongly Java focussed at the time) once had a fantastic collaborative coding plugin at one time, based on XMPP. It got killed because Sun wanted to foist their own "via Sun servers" thing on everybody. Needless to say, both solutions died on the vine. How sad.
Browser-based BS... I'm never going to buy it. Personal prediction (contact me if you're willing to put Swiss money on it; I am!) - in 5 to 8 years' time the pendulum will be swinging back to device-/locally-hosted apps because of $unforeseen-issues. And fashion.
JetBrains seems to be forging ahead with their own Space project and not trying to partner too closely with any existing forge. They seem to understand "IDE-in-browser" undermines their fundamental market position; they need to make people not need the browser in the first place, to retain it.
JetBrains' fundamental market position is that companies pay per seat for an it-just-works IDE. So if anything, IDE-in-browser, where code is executing on a hosted backend, is even more aligned with this.
The real question is whether they can execute on this. Will they be able to replicate years of VS Code's work on providing UI extensibility without sacrificing performance, with a team that historically had been JVM rather than JS/TS experts? Will they be able to build the right abstractions to allow for temporary network outages and all the distributed-systems challenges that come with that? It's quite a moonshot to get to the level that people expect of VS Code, especially as Microsoft has access to relatively-limitless capital in ways that JetBrains, which has not taken outside investment, does not.
I’m confused by this comment. Why do they need to move to browser-based JS/TS?
Their existing toolchain is all about doing everything in the IDE. (Remote dev envs, code review, all of it).
Am I missing something? I haven’t seen anything which suggests they are going down the path you refer to here. A local client they own is their differentiator over the browser, why would they abandon that?
I dunno, most of the stuff in Fleet looks to me like it benefits from being a native thin-client rather than a browser-based app (e.g. SSH to your remotes, run the language server locally, etc).
I can see that a web-UI option could be built atop the "Space-hosted everything" architecture they are putting together, but I don't see any evidence that's actually what their core strategy is, as GP suggested. They spend a bunch of time discussing running things on "Your machine" too, which doesn't sound like a browser-first strategy.
As I see it, their secret sauce is building client-side applications that are faster than other companies can build. I just don't see them giving up that performance edge to make a browser-based client their primary strategy.
> They seem to understand "IDE-in-browser" undermines their fundamental market position
How so?
They've recently rolled out the "gateway" product, which is basically a remote IDE. Sure, you still connect to that with a local one, but the local one doesn't do that much. Why not move it to a browser? The remote one does all the things people love about their IDEs. And if people don't care, they're probably not using their products anyway.
The only issue I'd have with a browser, is that I usually use Vim keybindings, which I've never seen well implemented. My favorite being the window intercepting ^W.
Gateway is a remote IDE in the browser, it's a rewrite of their front-end (Spring I think?) to marshal the UI over HTTP.
Remote is similar to VSCode. The IDE is split into a front-end and a backend: the UI stuff happens locally, and does RPC to the backend for file access, terminal, language server, what-not.
JetBrains gives products in very niche areas. WebStorm for JS, PHPStorm for PHP, RubyMine for Ruby, and GoLand for GoLang.
Visual Studio Code is used by people who like to many languages, but more specifically for someone who's job is to work with JavaScript then WebStorm is much better. JetBrains could very well combine all these IDEs into one, but then again think about the amount of space and data of this new IDE.
I've seen Fleet in my JB Toolbox, but haven't touched it yet.
But it is the obvious move. All the current JB IDEs are built upon the same basic IntelliJ platform, anyway.
It's "only" a matter of restructuring all that to have only one IDE where you can opt-in to support specific languages and now you have something like VSCode.
I'm not sure why, but nobody I know uses this setup – everybody has 2–3 separate IDEs (one for backend, one for frontend etc).
The initial reason behind having separate IDEs for every language, or so I was told, was using different keybindings. This way, XCode users could easily switch to AppCode, Visual Studio users – to Rider etc. – without the need to re-learn anything. (This is the reason I still have Atom keybindings in my Codium setup.)
But why would anyone want to use different IDEs with different keybindings is a complete mystery to me.
I may be mistaken but AFAIK plugins are not always at feature parity with the full jetbrains IDEs. For example the rust plugin in intellij did not support debugging but the one in CLion did (I think this is fixed now).
The python plugin in intellij was a little inferior to Pycharm for Django (pycharm had deeper support for the django ORM) and so on.
I think the reason for the difference between clion and idea for the rust plugin is that clion seems somehow different "on a lower level". It still has support for profiling and valgrind, which Idea lacks [0].
Regarding Django, do you have some examples? I'm admittedly not a hardcore Django user, but I haven't seen any difference between the two.
CLion isn't the best comparison here, as there are some architectural differences between CLion and the other IDES (IntelliJ, PyCharm, WebStorm, etc), which is the reason there isn't a C/C++ plugin for IntelliJ.
That’s absurd! I’ve used the same IDEA Ultimate instance for all languages I touch. Often 3 in the same project. Haven’t seen the point of having separate IDEA/Webstorm/Pycharm instances when one delivers all the functionality of the others.
I’m looking forward to Fleet, watching it closely. But it still has some kinks preventing me from adopting it. Once they polish up the elixir-ls integration I’ll give it a serious shot.
Like my sibling described there are weird quirks. The bigger problem is that this isn't a well documented and supported path. And if you wanted to spend time fiddling with my IDE you wouldn't be using Jetbrains.
What do you mean by "scientific modes"? Jupyter notebooks?
I've never used that, so I don't know what it is exactly nor how to compare. But, although the product comparison page [0] says idea lacks it, there's a doc page that says it has it [1]. It also shows up in the settings window of my IdeaU with Python plugin.
According to this other comparison page [2], it would actually seem that the Idea plugin does more than Pycharm.
Aside from the newly introduced Fleet the other commenter pointed out, Jetbrains' IDEA Ultimate can include all the functionality of all the individual niche products (via plugins), so you could just use a single Jetbrains IDE for most any language/flow you choose. I personally kind of like to keep them separate so I can keep different envs configured the way I most often use them, but you could just use the single IDE for all.
I thought it was weird when Jetbrains started to split up their product into language-specific products, but given how many people say they use WebStorm or an other niche product, and who say they use multiple, I can't blame Jetbrains - I think that in hindsight it was a great business move. An expensive "I can do everything" product has a higher barrier to entry than a specialized product.
Personally I've been using Ultimate on and off over the years, since I've never really stuck to any one language; at my previous job it was a mix of PHP / JS (Dojo), Go, Typescript, and sometimes (reading) C code which didn't quite work right in Ultimate.
VS Code can do all that too, but only intellij was able to actually help me with stuff - things like set the version of PHP to 5.2 so it warns me if I tried to use the PHP 5.3 array shorthand. (I did not choose PHP by the way and the project was to replace it)
> I thought it was weird when Jetbrains started to split up their product into language-specific products
They're for different audiences; the hurdle of trying to explain to a JS dev "yeah, I know when it starts up it asks for a Maven/Gradle/JVM, but just ignore that and open a directory after you install the following 8 plugins" is bad DX. As others have said, the standalone products are not feature parity with the IJ plugins. I have no idea why that is, or what incentives are driving that, but for the time being it is what it is
Can confirm... IDEA Ultimate (and Community to a lesser extent) lets me write code in Java, Groovy, Kotlin (and with slightly fewer features, but still really good support), Go, Rust, JavaScript, TypeScript, and of course, HTML/CSS... probably more but those are what I normally use.
VS Code is getting support for all the newer languages though... similar to how it used to be before with Eclipse (for those who remember the multitude of Eclipse-based IDEs for niche uses in the 2000's) and emacs (which still gets support for most esoteric langs, even if half baked, pretty quickly)... for example, I can use Zig in both emacs and VS Code, but not IntelliJ (I think they are writing one , but it was really unusable when I last checked it out). And stuff like Julia, Common Lisp.... I tend to go to emacs for those... but apparently supporting VS Code is high priority for even these languages nowadays.
I don't use them all at the same time :D sometimes I might go for months without touching some of them but I always find an excuse to go back so I don't lose the knowledge. No particular reason to try to keep up with many languages, I just enjoy it.
C/C++ is only 'one language' (I know, but for sake of this discussion, may as well be), and even then, Intellij does just fine for me, even if it's not on par with Clion. To say it doesn't support mixed language development is silly. In one sizeable project I have python, js, TS, kotlin, Java, bash, groovy, even a little C. All of it works in Intellij ultimate with code completion, refactoring, goto definition, find usages, etc. And it does it does better and faster than the same project when attempting to use VSCode. VSCode starts getting real slow trying to find references and whatnot on significant size projects, and the refactoring is night and day better in Intellij.
> Visual Studio Code is used by people who like to many languages
I don't like these language. I'm forced to write them. I didn't ask for terraform, typescript, CSS, HTML, yaml, xml, JSON, and everything else.
> for someone who's job is to work with JavaScript then WebStorm is much better
It's never been my experience that a full IDE is better for dynamic interpreted languages. Maybe if you're used to that from writing C# or Java it's nice, but I'll sooner take vi.
But like you said, thanks to lots of people that came before me, I'm not just writing one language, I'm writing many. Right now, I have tabs open with eight different languages. I need something that's suitable at everything, not just one language.
> It's never been my experience that a full IDE is better for dynamic interpreted languages.
IntelliJ IDEs are very good at figuring out dynamic languages, but on top of that they also know a lot of tooling and frameworks. So even if you have dynamic Python, but use it in Django, IDEA/PyCharm will be able to give you completions, code navigation, and refactoring just by the virtue of knowing what goes where in Django.
I get that from vscode and pylance/mypy already. I get the same thing with vscode and sorbet for Ruby. Why would I go through all the trouble of using IntelliJ for that?
Some of it made its way into VS Code, but many things definitely didn't (because they require more than just LSP and reuire someone to write a bunch of analysis tools for the python integration).
Try pycharm. It does fantastic error checking that you'd normally need to test the code for. For example, it will infer types for variables and then highlight lines that will cause problems at runtime. It's saved me days of testing the first week I used it.
I use it when it makes sense. My point is that on the spectrum of IDE <--> text editor, I'd much rather take the text editor than the IDE. The performance and ease of use of a simple text editor vastly dominates whatever convenience(s) the IDE claims to provide. Vscode is my usually my daily driver, as it's fast, has effective built-in refactoring tools, and has a decent plugin ecosystem.
No, it's python-specific. I was responding to parent's remark on dynamic languages. C++ is reasonably well served by CLion. I don't know what works for VHDL.
However, I am a bit worried that it looks like most of these companies and up using VSCode. It really needs to have a good competitor in this space, and I hope JetBrains can match that eventually with partnerships of their own.