Oh that's awesome!
I've come to actually use the Jetbrains programs since they introduced the New UI. It clearly feels very VS Code inspired but I'm glad it's no longer a weird mess of UI all over the place. Now it's a nice IDE for C and Lisp :)
I’m currently trying the new UI, but find it slower to work with than the old one. It has many things hidden behind menus now, which makes the UI prettier but less effective.
Yeah I totally understand that. I do have to give them credit though because everything is still technically "reachable with the same steps". For example, I was reading a help article which went like go to "X > Y > Z" menu. And in the new UI it was surprisingly exactly the same way to get there as in the old one.
I think it's easier to press than anything more conventional (and also super-easy to remember). This fast and smart jumping around function is one of the biggest things I miss when I use Emacs — and the shortcut is an important part of the experience.
> I just press it occasionally.
Wouldn't that be a big problem only if it was something more destructive than a search popup?
P.S. But I may have a weird perspective on shortcuts: the one I have sweared about pressing accidentally more than once is Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. For the unfamiliar: it's an emergency way to kill the X server (=> the entire graphical user session), nowadays usually disabled by default.
I think the new UI in IntelliJ is a "patch" to keep from bleeding users. The UI in the final form of their next gen ui (Even now, Fleet is a much more polished implementation IMO). So much so, that recreated a lot of it in vsCode.
That is cool. On rare occasion I need to use Clojure for work projects, and then I really like Cursive + IntelliJ. That is an existence proof that a Common Lisp plugin + IntelliJ could be awesome.
I paid $3500 for a LispWorks Pro license and so far I have been paying the $750/year maintenance fee. It is really nice, but as I find myself using Python much more than Common Lisp, I might drop paying maintenance and eventually go back to SBCL. Even with LispWorks I usually use Emacs + Slime.
Anyway, this new SLT plugin is in my “must play with” list. Thanks to the developers.
That is correct. I prefer Lisp languages, but if I can get something done much faster using Python because of library availability then I will roll with Python.
w.r.t. "THIS PLUGIN IS EXPERIMENTAL and can crash at any time! Please report all bugs!", there are quite a few existing plugins that capture exceptions from their plugin and send those error reports in some automated way (email, Sentry, I think one even had a GitHub issues action using an api token): https://plugins.jetbrains.com/intellij-platform-explorer/ext...
I mention this because (a) automated error reports are able to carry context with them that less experienced bug reporters might not know to send (b) it's a pet peeve of mine when an app asks me to gather up version and platform info that it already knows
Some people resent having information from their computer sent to someone else without their consent (merely using the plugin does not count as proper consent).
And based on demographics, that's probably going to be a much higher percentage of this group than in other groups.
A checkbox (off by default) to enable automated reporting would probably fly with most people though.
It's not without consent, it still requires two user-initiated actions: clicking on the red error icon in the bottom tray, then pushing "Submit" on the resulting dialog
Apologies if my use of "automated way" was interpreted as "automatic way"
Oh, thank goodness. If Common Lisp is going to grow as a language, it needs much better tooling than Emacs+SLIME. JetBrains is best-of-breed in development environments; integrating well with it or Visual Studio Code is a must for any language or framework today.
And prohibitively expensive. You can't position CL as an alternative to, say, Node when the only decent IDE for developing in it costs thousands of dollars.
Sure, you can get nerfed tools at lower license tiers. But if you can get full tooling with a UI that's more modern than Windows XP for some other language for less, why not pay less? This is why Lisp got its lunch ate in the 90s: Lisp vendors vastly overestimated the willingness of developers to pay dearly for Lisp when they can get 80% of Lisp for no or much more reasonable cost.
