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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

#281

Post by cube2222 »

lars_francke wrote: post #62
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…

Switch branches? Let's index it all again! Working on a Rust project? Let's index the Go stdlib. It'll be ready in 10-20 min, please hold. I've been waiting for indexing improvemence for over 10 years, not holding my breath.

Indexing performance has drastically improved for me in the last 1-2 years, to the point where it's become a non-issue. New projects index very quickly, and adding new libraries also indexes quickly. It's an order of magnitude better than a few years ago.

That's both on my 16-inch M1 Max and my M2 Air with Go in Goland.

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

#282

Post by Maxburn »

pyridines wrote: post #116
wolpoli wrote: post #85

> Removal of color from icons. Software is getting very depressing as designers decide that everything needs to be shades of grey. It's really sad.

IMO it's a usability issue. Instead of scanning the UI for a color+shape, there's only a shape. It's less distinguishable from the other icons, so I'll be slower to find it on the screen. (Similarly, this also bothers me with the PS5 controller. The triangle, circle, square and X buttons no longer have different colors. This might not be an issue if you're already familiar with the button layout, but I bet it makes i…

Agree, color+shape is important in finding things. I rather like the way thunderbird went recently with the important folder colors. Much better. Moving away from that is a step in the wrong direction.

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

#284

Post by albertopv »

SebastianKra wrote: post #232

> - Rounding of corners. Religion at this point > - Homogenization. JetBrains wants to be like VSCode > - Animations. Haven't seen them but it will be filled Seriously, HN? This is the quality that you reward with hundreds of points? Unlike the author, I happen to have used this UI for the past five months and it solves many of my longstanding gripes with IntelliJ: - Gutters are now much better at highlighting local…

IS this new UI going to solve slow indexing problem? I mean, real problems, the ones that really block our work?

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

#285

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#286

Post by kmlx »

albertopv wrote: post #284
SebastianKra wrote: post #232

> - Rounding of corners. Religion at this point > - Homogenization. JetBrains wants to be like VSCode > - Animations. Haven't seen them but it will be filled Seriously, HN? This is the quality that you reward with hundreds of points? Unlike the author, I happen to have used this UI for the past five months and it solves many of my longstanding gripes with IntelliJ: - Gutters are now much better at highlighting local…

IS this new UI going to solve slow indexing problem? I mean, real problems, the ones that really block our work?

is the new UI somehow blocking solving the problems that you mentioned? no. companies can work on multiple things at once.

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

#287

Post by alpaca128 »

I like rounded buttons. I prefer a bit of empty space over having a cluttered UI filled with buttons I'll never use. I like animations.

The problems with such UI overhauls is usually that the changes overshoot the target by a mile and the designers seem to focus more on visual design than usability. Animations are almost always too long, because their purpose - for example signalling that it has registered the input - is forgotten.

At this point at least web apps should just offer options to completely configure the UI layout with a JSON or HTML file and CSS.

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

#288

Post by wruza »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #231
matthewmacleod wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s funny, because I’m always skeptical about people who fire in all judgy about the way other people work when they know literally nothing about who they are or what they do, and I am always right.

I think that parent’s point was that debugging is an exceedingly powerful tool, and therefore leaving it out of your toolset by definition makes you less powerful as a programmer. It’s not even such an esoteric skill - operating the simplest kind of a GUI debugger is maybe learning 5-6 different actions, and the IDE often takes care of the details of setting up the debugger for you.

On the contrary, I find a common debugger (see questions below) an underwhelming experience, not a powerful tool.

Can it:

- assign (scenario, subsystem, level, description) to breakpoints and watches, so they can be turned on/off or selected in groups for debugging without removal?

- commit these scenarios of bps and watches into a repository?

- edit/read them in a textual form to patch or share over an IM?

- store traces of previous sessions and diff them to find out what changed?

Does anything even remotely similar exist? Most debuggers are just test-pause-and-inspect tools with “integration” in the form of eval on mouse hover. Their ux and dx sucks and the only reason I could find to use them were slow build times and too low-level runtimes, which are no more today.

Pretty sure most people avoid debuggers not because they are too hard to learn (they aren’t), but because they are too dumb to be useful, given that you can ‘if (cond) log.level(…)’ and restart instantly.

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

#289

Post by oblio »

_tom_ wrote: post #165
rob74 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you are being cynical - what they write is: > The current UI will remain available for at least two years, and we’re not going to remove it until we’ve seen that the vast majority of our users have successfully made the switch to the new UI. this sounds like you have to actively switch to the new UI if you already have an older version installed, and that they will be monitoring how many users have made the switc…

What they have written is they are going to force a change. It's very clear. As soon as we have moved most people over, we will force you to move. You don't even have to read between the lines, it's explicit. "We won't force it for two years". We are gonna force it in two years. "We won't until the vast minority" we will as soon as most people have moved.

Software developers as developers: "Why does that random guy still pay for v1??? It's 20 years old, using Java 5 and old crap, let's force them to upgrade!!!!"

Software developers as users: "Don't force me to upgrade"

The hypocrisy is tangible and close to mind boggling.

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

#290

Post by jdbernard »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #231
matthewmacleod wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s funny, because I’m always skeptical about people who fire in all judgy about the way other people work when they know literally nothing about who they are or what they do, and I am always right.

I think that parent’s point was that debugging is an exceedingly powerful tool, and therefore leaving it out of your toolset by definition makes you less powerful as a programmer. It’s not even such an esoteric skill - operating the simplest kind of a GUI debugger is maybe learning 5-6 different actions, and the IDE often takes care of the details of setting up the debugger for you.

I don't know that I'm convinced of that point though. I've been developing software professionally for almost 20 years and my usage and reliance on a debugger has decreased over time. At the moment, I think it's been probably three months since I've last used one.
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