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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

#141

Post by sylv3r »

happymellon wrote: post #38
ftyhbhyjnjk wrote: post #2

Seriously! Their slick, compact, and beautifully well laid out UI is one of the primary reasons I use I Intellij Idea. If they force this update, I'll just not update it. Not to mention, since I now will not be updating it, I can cancel my yearly, recurring subscription too. Hey Jetbrains: You just have to do one thing. And that is: to NOT mess up existing thing. Even if you stop launching new features into your prod…

On the flip side, the only thing I want Jetbrains to do is implement proper UI scaling. I want to be able to hit Command+Plus and scale up the whole interface for presenting something to the team or when I have to code pair with someone who doesn't have as large of a monitor as I do. Presentation mode is an absolute mess, and does not help with code pairing or code review presentations, and font scaling only affects…

> On the flip side, the only thing I want Jetbrains to do is implement proper UI scaling.

Oh man I'm still mad that if I want to present my Jetbrains IDE screen and make it readable, I have to change 2 fonts, one for the editor, one for the interface.

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

#142

Post by ehakan »

I honestly like it. IMO IntelliJ UIs were unnecessarily clunky. Vertical text was weird, and hard to read for me on higher resolutions, along with really small icons that forced you to actually parse the list for what I need. If you’re on a small resolution and have a lot of tool windows on the left side, the upper left tool window text and lower left texts runs into each other. Bottom bar was inconsistent, the items on that bar constantly change. 2 bars of vertical text, and an endless bottom bar, it felt like they were trying to back my editor into a corner. After using it like that for years, I finally gave up, just disabled most UI components and tolerated suboptimal keyboard shortcuts for finding and using tool windows. This UI update for the first time feels like I’m not flanked by clutter in a Jetbrains IDE

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

#143

Post by jbhouse »

Hot take time.

Actual professionals use keyboard shortcuts to easily navigate or bring to the forefront whatever they need in Intellij (the JB product I use)

If you are clicking through menus all day or are otherwise negatively affected to such a degree by a visual change like this, you are an amateur

So really, JetBrains is bringing consumer-grade UI practices to the world of... amateurs

This world for amateurs exists exists, as a crutch, within the larger world of the professional product.

However, the world of professional usage of Intellij remains essentially unchanged (granted, the new icons and extra negative space are annoying, they just are not significant)

TLDR: git gud, use a keyboard

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

#144

Post by mrunkel »

colordrops wrote: post #96
faizshah wrote: post #52

Eh, I have used vim, spacemacs, sublime, vscode, atom, eclipse and netbeans. Jetbrains IDEs have superior functionality out of the box across languages and don’t require me to mess with and debug a million plugins. I don’t mind a UI refresh, it’s going to be just like the gmail refresh everyone hated it and now we’re all fine with it. I just wish they would invest more money into things that are actually a problem cu…

If you are a professional developer, and plan to be working for several decades, is it really that much of an investment to maintain your editor config a la vim or emacs? I did a lot of work setting up vim 10 years ago, and have only had to tweak it since. It works exactly as I expect, anywhere, in a terminal, for free, and setup is as easy as checking out a repo and running a script. JetBrains is good for stuff I ra…

> Finding a particular config option is always a hunt.

Do you know you can search for an option in the settings menu? Actually, you can search just about everywhere.

You can also set your IDE to store your config in a git repo so that it's the same everywhere you use it.

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

#145

Post by pjerem »

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.

Yes but JetBrains IDEs are packed with literally thousands of useful features. I use them since at least a decade and I discover new features at least every month. And for this, a discoverable GUI is really important.

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

#146

Post by manmal »

bugbuddy wrote: post #103

Yet another another great product that is falling prey to the newism ideology where change is almost worshipped for its own sake. You see this problem everywhere nowadays from Cinemas to architecture. People have lost the ability to appreciate timeless designs. Another good example of this is the new Apple iPhone 14 pro hole. To many it is better because it is newer. Never mind that the fact that there is actually no…

It’s not change for change‘s sake though. People are migrating towards mobile displays and actually doing work on those - as small as 11“. IntelliJ doesn’t work well on those displays. I‘m not saying we shouldn’t have both options (eg minimal mode and pro mode or whatever).

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

#147

Post by alias_neo »

dietr1ch wrote: post #139
alias_neo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fast and light which it currently is not. It was also pretty easy to find and read your email, which it currently is not.

You can still opt-in into the ancient HTML UI. It's really lightweight and network-bandwidth friendly, but not having shortcuts for some basic actions makes it a little bit too arcane and sometimes way slower than just paying the resource costs. I wish there was a better balance between both UIs. The "better looking" one wastes too much resources (CPU, memory, screen space).

Thanks, I didn't know that, I think I'll switch it back.

It's not about resource cost for me, I use high end hardware and fast connections (coupled with ad and script blockers, both in-browser and at network level, which are probably adding to the frustration) and not only does it load and run like complete crap, I literally couldn't find an email I knew was there in my "inbox" last time I opened it.

I only use Gmail/Workspace for family/personal stuff so I just use mobile apps 99% of the time now, but if I had to use it more regularly I'd be quite annoyed.

Not that Office 365 which I use for work is any better in a web browser.

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

#148

Post by pjmlp »

faizshah wrote: post #52

Eh, I have used vim, spacemacs, sublime, vscode, atom, eclipse and netbeans. Jetbrains IDEs have superior functionality out of the box across languages and don’t require me to mess with and debug a million plugins. I don’t mind a UI refresh, it’s going to be just like the gmail refresh everyone hated it and now we’re all fine with it. I just wish they would invest more money into things that are actually a problem cu…

Try to debug JNI code in Jetbrains IDEs, go try it. Ah, I forgot they rather sell a Clion license instead.

Or stop the damm thing to run indexing, or avoid doing 10 finger combos, showing code problems without running inspections, doing Java compilation on save without using Eclipse's own compiler,...

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

#150

Post by marcolussetti »

this_is_not_you wrote: post #117
9dev wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do that, I’m playing with it now. Have a look at Jetbrains Gateway: https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/gateway/

How is it working for you? I tried the beta version last year and I was not impressed. Is it worth trying again?

I found the performance very poor and had to discontinue using it. It permanently pinned 4 cores on the remote server where VS Code used <0.25 (codebase was a very small Django app)
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