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Fleet, a Lightweight IDE from JetBrains

blog.jetbrains.com

41–50 of 427 posts

Re: Fleet, a Lightweight IDE from JetBrains

#41

What can Fleet do that VSCode doesn't already do better? I'm looking at the architecture description [1], and it seems like it's set up almost identically to how VSCode handles remote editing and language servers. Sure, Fleet is integrated with JetBrains' Spaces, but will that ever stand up to Github's offerings? I use both VSCode and JetBrains' IDEs in my day-to-day work so I would consider myself as having one foot…

Well, I mean to be fair the coding services for most languages in vscode other than js (ie java, c, rust, python, go, php, c#, ruby specifically) suck totally compared to the JB tooling. Let’s not play “pretend vscode is amazing” here today. The plug-ins for many languages are of massively varying quality and some of them really suck . The only thing they having going for them is being free. So… It’s pretty questiona…

Yep. Honestly, if Jetbrains made a perfect clone of VSCode, but with all the language support and plugins I use remade in high quality, I'd be happy to pay for it.

Re: Fleet, a Lightweight IDE from JetBrains

#42

What can Fleet do that VSCode doesn't already do better? I'm looking at the architecture description [1], and it seems like it's set up almost identically to how VSCode handles remote editing and language servers. Sure, Fleet is integrated with JetBrains' Spaces, but will that ever stand up to Github's offerings? I use both VSCode and JetBrains' IDEs in my day-to-day work so I would consider myself as having one foot…

[deleted]

Re: Fleet, a Lightweight IDE from JetBrains

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VS Code also starts in "seconds" on my machine, so if that's what they're targeting it's probably a success.

Vim/Neovim is practically instant, everything else it too slow in my book.

Once vs code and similar are up, the observed latency in opening additional files is what matters to most devs though.

Re: Fleet, a Lightweight IDE from JetBrains

#44
post #5

I really hope it's not Electron-based.

Same. Similarly, since VS Code is the obvious comparison here, I really hope they're planning to open source the basic version of this once it's out of beta. I could really see myself using this if it manages to be both open source and actually lightweight and not a 300+ MB blob.

Re: Fleet, a Lightweight IDE from JetBrains

#45
post #37

There’s a real opportunity here for JB. If they’re prepared to give this away for free, and make money off of upselling folk on hosted remote dev envs (or licensing the server side to cloud providers) then this could actually compete with vscode. They basically don’t have any other product that is competitive with vscode. …but, I’m skeptical they’re willing to make the jump to freemium based on their other SAS produc…

JetBrains are not opposed to giving IDEs away & upselling which they're already doing for their Intelli IDEA Community [1] and PyCharm Community IDEs [2]. Since this is a direct answer to VS Code's dominance, I expect they'll do something similar and have a free version that can can be run on commercial hosting options, e.g. Space, Cloud & Docker. [1] https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/ [2] https://www.jetbrains…

And you can regularly use their IDEs for free through the Early Access Program. No license required.

Re: Fleet, a Lightweight IDE from JetBrains

#48
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope it's free too. Otherwise it makes no sense. As a customer paying for full IDE(Rider) I won't kneecap myself by paying for vscode alternative, even though I really hate working in vscode. If they make it free, they could get a big chunk of the market, especially if they actually provide it with IntelliJ level of autocomplete, refactorings, multicursor support etc. They have quite a lot of money from regu…

>If they make it free, they could get a big chunk of the market, especially if they actually provide it with IntelliJ level of autocomplete, refactorings, multicursor support etc. If they did that, then why would anyone buy IntelliJ? I understand why Microsoft came out with VSCode. They didn't have anything to offer for developers who weren't already bought into the Windows/.Net stack. VSCode was an effort to reach o…

> If they did that, then why would anyone buy IntelliJ?

I think the general idea is that it's a lightweight editor(like vscode) that stays lightweight with as many features as it can from IntelliJ. If you work on decently sized project you'll still want to use full IDE. If you want to force yourself to work on a big project with vscode, nothing is stopping you. But would you realistically switch from IntelliJ to vscode? Probably not, even though it technically supports (almost?) everything you need.

In my case f.e. I'll continue to work using Rider, but I'd like to be able to open some minor html/js/other projects(like our Azure B2C Templates, or my Azure DevOps extension project which is mostly powershell) in something smaller. Currently I can do that using vscode, but I'm not a big fan of vscode itself so it's usually just annoying.

Re: Fleet, a Lightweight IDE from JetBrains

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VS Code also starts in "seconds" on my machine, so if that's what they're targeting it's probably a success.

Vim/Neovim is practically instant, everything else it too slow in my book.

On a given workday I always have at least one window of vscodr open that makes opening new files much faster than a cold start like vim et al are used

Re: Fleet, a Lightweight IDE from JetBrains

#50

There’s a real opportunity here for JB. If they’re prepared to give this away for free, and make money off of upselling folk on hosted remote dev envs (or licensing the server side to cloud providers) then this could actually compete with vscode. They basically don’t have any other product that is competitive with vscode. …but, I’m skeptical they’re willing to make the jump to freemium based on their other SAS produc…

I don't see why they won't go the freemium route with Fleet. You can see it in IntelliJ already - CE is more than good enough for almost everything you want to do, but if you want tighter integration with Spring or other web frameworks, you can spring (pun intended) for Ultimate. Fleet could be like that - everything is baseline "good" with a bunch of first-party paid extensions that add a bunch of powerful capabilities - sort of like ReSharper for VS.
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