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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

#321

Post by soulofmischief »

mcluck wrote: post #274
matsemann wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I'm not "rewarding the post with hundred of points", but I've upvoted because I share the sentiment and want JetBrains to really consider each change they make: Is it for change's sake, or because it's actually better ?

What makes you think that they haven't already considered it? It's rather offensive to assume that a group of UX professionals decided to take on a massive overhaul just for fun. Given UX has never been a major priority at JetBrains, it implies that they decided it was valuable enough to spend the time and money on this. I just can't imagine this was done on a whim

> It's rather offensive to assume that a group of UX professionals decided to take on a massive overhaul just for fun.

Why does this surprise you when it happens all of the time? As a UX professional myself this is one of the banes of my existence.

Consider it's less often a "team of UX professionals" who make these decisions, and more often the manager of the month passing out a resume item.

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

#322

Post by TheCapeGreek »

toxicFork wrote: post #170
TheCapeGreek wrote: post #163

Am I the only one who has a mostly clear IDE? Stock Jetbrains IDEs are way too cluttered. You can replace the entire menu bar and a few other things with learning the shortcut to search Actions and the omni search shortcut for code & more. So long as those are retained in the new UI, I don't see the issue here. Tangent: This to me is the same as the obsession with multiple monitors. You don't need it. Virtual desktop…

Tangent: I am traveling at the moment and I miss my second monitor a lot. It's like saying you don't need toilets when you can dig a hole in the ground and use leaves to wipe instead of toilet paper.

You've not optimised your workflow for your environment, but instead it's the fault of the tools given to you for being too primitive? Come on.

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

#323

Post by concordDance »

frankfrankfrank wrote: post #301
dijit wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Controversially: I also much prefer the usability of older Windows operating systems, the scrollbars that don't hide, the double click semantics that are consistent across the whole OS. It might look a lot prettier now, but it's much harder to actually do things from zero knowledge, I do fear we've regressed.

I’m going to say something even more controversial, but true; that the obfuscated thing these two prior comments are really noting is a degradation that has been obscured in distracting color or design language changes. It’s akin to “shrinkflation” that is now even totally overshadowed by the real rise in prices they said wouldn’t happen, people are starting to notice things like “hey, why are there now far less feat…

I'm happy enough to join the revolution comrade, but do we have enough men and guns to bring down the oppressors?

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

#324

Post by jenscow »

noizz wrote: post #316
jenscow wrote: post #302

I've actually used the new UI, on Rider and WebStorm on Linux. It's not bad, and majority of changes make it more usable. When I go back to an older install, I prefer the new UI. - Increased margins/padding: At first, I thought it was a waste of space - but things are now easier to click on. I realised this when loading an older version on another machine. I'd still like to be able to tweak this - the document tabs a…

Can you split vertical panels? Like project files on top half and terminal on the other half? I haven't found this option on early previews and haven't had a chance to play with it again.

No. Only 1 left side, 1 right side, 1 or 2 bottom. No splitting/combining/tabbing.

You can still have them floating, then whatever layout you want - but it's not the same.

This is the worst "improvement", by far.

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

#325

Post by toxicFork »

TheCapeGreek wrote: post #322
toxicFork wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangent: I am traveling at the moment and I miss my second monitor a lot. It's like saying you don't need toilets when you can dig a hole in the ground and use leaves to wipe instead of toilet paper.

You've not optimised your workflow for your environment, but instead it's the fault of the tools given to you for being too primitive? Come on.

I have optimised my workflow, I am still productive, but the second monitor still brings me joys that nothing else can.

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

#326

Post by eitland »

mcluck wrote: post #274
matsemann wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I'm not "rewarding the post with hundred of points", but I've upvoted because I share the sentiment and want JetBrains to really consider each change they make: Is it for change's sake, or because it's actually better ?

What makes you think that they haven't already considered it? It's rather offensive to assume that a group of UX professionals decided to take on a massive overhaul just for fun. Given UX has never been a major priority at JetBrains, it implies that they decided it was valuable enough to spend the time and money on this. I just can't imagine this was done on a whim

It might not be fair to group the UX designers of Jetbrains with every other UX designer.

But it is a giant problem that the industry has been "simplifying" everything so mindlessly for so many years that today my iOS device gave me a legitimate prompt that just didn't contain enough information to decide about at all.

Something along the lines of "Change in app administration [...] will you allow [...] to administer Gmail [...] Your data will be administered."

Now tell me: is this thing going to administer my private mails? 2 factor verification? (Yes, Google often use their mail app for that.) etc etc.

At this point it is utterly meaningless: the only correct thing to do with such a vague prompt is to say no until an explanation has been given.

But I can surely imagine UX developers patting themselves and each others on the back for such a brilliant simple design.

To be fair, good UX designers exist, but everytime I hear about ux-designers near any of my products I get a little scared :-)

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

#327

Post by stack_framer »

I've been happily paying for my own WebStorm license for 7 years—using it at home and at work. In the middle of that, I tried VS Code for a whole year at a new job, to really see how it compared (my new team was using it).

It wasn't better in any way. In fact, most days I just missed WebStorm, but I soldiered on to see if I could find anything that was truly an improvement. At the end of my self-imposed, one-year trial, I concluded that VS Code had just one "advantage": it was free. Its barrier to entry was zero, from a pricing perspective. But since I had really given VS Code a fair shake, I gladly went back to WebStorm at work.

Fast forward to this year, when I ran head on into a serious WebStorm performance problem: type checking a very large TypeScript code base. The WebStorm logs show that the TypeScript language server is crashing, and I filed a bug with JetBrains many months ago, but zero progress. VS Code, on the other hand, has no problem type checking this huge code base—it happens near instantly. For months I have now had WebStorm open for editing, and VS Code open for type checking, which is ridiculous, and I'd be embarrassed if my team knew I was doing this.

It pains me greatly to say it, but perhaps the time has come to cancel my WebStorm license and just switch to VS Code.

I mean, why not, if JetBrains is just set on copying VS Code anyway? I'll take better performance with a worse UI, and it seems like that's precisely what VS Code can give me at this point. How sad.

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

#329

Post by throwaway2037 »

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?

Zero trolling. Can you give a real world example of slow indexing? If you work in a /more/ dynamic language like Python, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, it is very difficult to write a fast, accurate indexer. However, for /more/ strictly-typed languages like C, C#, Java, Scala, it is much easier to write a very fast, accurate index. (Leave aside C++ as it is so insanely context dependent, but LLVM has made amazing work of it.)

Some anecdata, three times in my career, I have worked on massive 1M+ line of code Java projects -- single repo. The initial Apache Maven download of dependent JARs plus indexing might take one hour or so. After that: Lightspeed. Yes, I do agree: When you are forced to invalidate your indexes, the next restart is painful.

More anecdata: One of my current projects is Python 3+. The indexing is much slower and less accurate. Plus, we use lots of binary libraries (compiled native code), which seems to trigger indexing on each restart. But whatever, get a 5GHz machine, give IntelliJ 16GB of RAM and let it run. In 2022, are there any serious alternatives besides a Titanic-sized IDE for enormous complex codebases? I don't see any that average developers (myself) will use.

Last point to mix big IDEs with C++: Visual Studio (as much as a cringe writing anything positive about Microsoft) is a phenom platform. For years, it absolutely dominated C++ IDEs. IntelliSense was mind-blowing in C++ and force multiplier that was unmatched for many, many years. It is still very impressive to me. I am sure they feel JetBrains' CLion biting at their heels!

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

#330

Post by dmitriid »

iampivot wrote: post #303
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…

This one caught me out; - "The toolbar has less icons now" - It's customisable, you can put whatever you want in there. Yes, with colourful icons. I was wondering where the back / forward buttons were, but realised after a while that they can be put back in, just with some configuration.

Most of the time if some UI requires you to configure it, it's a badly designed product. With very very few exceptions.
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