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Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI

neil.computer

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Re: Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI

#21

Post by spockz »

djha-skin wrote: post #3

Obligatory xkcd reference to "UI Change": https://xkcd.com/1770/ JetBrains is obviously becoming more like VS Code here so that they aren't edged out of the market. "Copy your competitors". Complaining as if we are paying customers is understandable because UI changes are annoying. However we have to see things from JetBrain's perspective. They're trying to stay alive in a market where their market share is rapidly d…

Why is VSCode eating their lunch? IntelliJ’s refactoring is miles ahead. As well as support for the jvm languages. Intellisafe and jump to declaration are also better imho.

The only thing that I can think of is that vscode is free and “good enough”. The integration for JavaScript and golang seems to be more “natural” in VSCode, somehow.

If you are using the free IntelliJ tools you get a crappy js editor when using the rust or Java specific IDE. Now I need to install another IntelliJ app.

Also I like being able to run vscode with a dev container. It allows new team members to instantly start working on a project and grt most things done.

Re: Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI

#23

Post by javajosh »

It's a little surprising that these UI choices are not a matter of user choice. Although when you think of the complexity of making a truly skinnable UI, or a component framework (I'm thinking Swing and the pluggable look and feel, or PLAF) Swing that IntelliJ used to be nominally written in. In that universe you could have made your own PLAF and rendered IntelliJ in that PLAF without asking permission.

It turns out, though, there is a lot of value in homogenizing your application skin. Users can recognize each other's applications, and help each other out. Whole categories of problems are avoided, like poorly written custom components that aren't PLAF compatible. I don't have the answer, but I find it interesting to consider the forces pushing for and against putting greater UI control in user hands.

Re: Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI

#25

Post by TylerE »

keyle wrote: post #18

After years of using IntelliJ I finally moved to VSCode. IntelliJ simply could do C/C++ but they chose to push people towards a new IDE... C Lion. That was a huge blow for me, a polyglot. Then I had a couple of bug opened with them... it took years for them to fix it. Except they marked it as fixed and it was indeed not fixed... Years later! I kept paying until that point, I just couldn't do it anymore. The company i…

Huh? If you buy the full IntelliJ you get all the modules. It’s no different than running CLion.

Re: Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI

#26

Post by fareesh »

I find the entire "java world" as I like to think of it, littered with slow IDEs.

The "Electron bloat world" editors have been much more snappy in my experience.

Typically the "java world" editors will lag out to the point where tapping on the "File" menu will take 3-5 seconds on occasion. Also they seem to rely on "indexing" and while the "indexing" operating is taking place, the entire editor just slows to a complete crawl.

I've seen this in Android Studio, IntelliJ, Tizen Studio, Eclipse - pretty much anything that's "java world". Apologies for the imprecise nomenclature, but this has been my experience and after so many years it has reached a stage of just low expectations from me whenever I see anything related to these IDEs.

Re: Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI

#27

Post by pojzon »

keyle wrote: post #18

After years of using IntelliJ I finally moved to VSCode. IntelliJ simply could do C/C++ but they chose to push people towards a new IDE... C Lion. That was a huge blow for me, a polyglot. Then I had a couple of bug opened with them... it took years for them to fix it. Except they marked it as fixed and it was indeed not fixed... Years later! I kept paying until that point, I just couldn't do it anymore. The company i…

Reminds me of Terraform plugin that broke after 0.11 they „fixed it”, yet I still get notifications about new ppl commenting how its again broken in newer version.

You had one job JetBrains -> speed up developers. I dont need half of the features available. Terminal does a better job at most of them and will never change.

But for the stuff I need and is used by millions if not tens of millions of developers.. just keep it working.

I feel like its slowly the time to move to VSCode. An army of JS Devs will keep on updating it.

Re: Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI

#28

Post by vladvasiliu »

xwowsersx wrote: post #6

If you use keyboard shortcuts for everything , as I do, the rest of the UI outside of the editor really doesn't matter a whole lot. I won't be searching for buttons based on color memory or anything like that.

While I agree with this point, I also like my interfaces small. Because, since I don't click around on them, I don't like them taking up space.

I also use a mouse on my PC, so I'm fairly precise in case I want to use the icons. There's no need to blow them up, so my fat fingers wouldn't misclick on a tablet.

I like to code with two windows side by side, usually IDE + browser for docs, sometimes on a small screen. I'd rather have the extra pixels for the docs instead of random useless space around the IDE's widgets.

Re: Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI

#29

Post by olejorgenb »

djha-skin wrote: post #3

Obligatory xkcd reference to "UI Change": https://xkcd.com/1770/ JetBrains is obviously becoming more like VS Code here so that they aren't edged out of the market. "Copy your competitors". Complaining as if we are paying customers is understandable because UI changes are annoying. However we have to see things from JetBrain's perspective. They're trying to stay alive in a market where their market share is rapidly d…

But do you really think they're losing marketshare due to the UI?

VScode being free and comparable feature wise surely is the main challenge.

It doesn't help that VScode is catching up and in many cases surpassing their engine for some languages. Looking at their poor typescript performance and longstanding python type hinting bugs. I've also heard VScode has much better docker dev container support.

I get the it's not necessarily the same resources working the UI and these things but still. If the UI drastically change to be more like VSCode it's just one more reason for me as an existing customer to change.

Re: Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI

#30

Post by chrisbrandow »

These up trends make me nuts. Just like so much of apple’s desktop apps like App Store are removing classic list interfaces with two column collections views. Totally non standard, so lacking all of the useful filtering/alerting by column, etc.

Why?? For more white space.

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