Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI

neil.computer

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 420 posts

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

#381

Post by chrisandchris »

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…

[...] - "The toolbar has less icons now" - It's customisable, you can put whatever you want in there. Yes, with colourful icons. [...]

As someone who uses Rider, RubyMine, WebStorm (and sometimes PHPStorm) on a daily basis am worried that I now need to customize 4 IDEs (will they sync this config?). So until now I never wanted (or needed) to do that, now I have half a day work to get something I already have. I don't think that's progress.

Why not make it customizable, but let the default be the current state?

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

#382

Post by lucideer »

neilpanchal wrote: post #366
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…

The central point of the article missed right over you. The critique is about the culture that surrounds: changes in UI for no real reason other than subjectivist opinions, design trends, fashion or what-others-are-doing, unoriginality, homogenization and frameworks, and the complete disregard for professional users and their infantilization. Furthermore, changes need to be evaluated against retraining millions of pe…

> for no real reason

This happens but stating that the Jetbrains changes fall under this category is baseless speculation.

> This part seems to be missing in the calculation

What makes you say that?

I don't think anyone commenting here is in any doubt that needless/bad UI changes do happen in products. Noone's debating that general broad point. The thesis put forward by the article is that Jetbrains' changes specifically are an example of this trend. And it's very clear that the article is so lazily researched that none of the points listed do anything to support that specific thesis.

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

#383

Post by neilpanchal »

lucideer wrote: post #382
neilpanchal wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The central point of the article missed right over you. The critique is about the culture that surrounds: changes in UI for no real reason other than subjectivist opinions, design trends, fashion or what-others-are-doing, unoriginality, homogenization and frameworks, and the complete disregard for professional users and their infantilization. Furthermore, changes need to be evaluated against retraining millions of pe…

> for no real reason This happens but stating that the Jetbrains changes fall under this category is baseless speculation. > This part seems to be missing in the calculation What makes you say that? I don't think anyone commenting here is in any doubt that needless/bad UI changes do happen in products . Noone's debating that general broad point. The thesis put forward by the article is that Jetbrains' changes specifi…

I think these are reasons why UI has regressed continually in last 10-15 years. No one speaks up. Usually casted as “UI always changes, get used to it. Grumpy people will complain for any change. See Gmail.” I can understand why Apple changes UI: it’s a luxury/fashion company that makes computers and phones.

But a professional tool needs to follow UI changes that are not justified beyond flimsy reasons? Used by millions to make a living?

The onus is on designers to justify their aesthetic/fashion instincts, to justify their tendency to churn user interfaces, the tendency to turn highly functional and dense tools into fisher price toys in the name of minimalism and infantilization users.

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

#386

Post by albertopv »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #329
albertopv wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I work daily on a java 8 project with about 3k files, about 5k classes. Small in comparison. When I have to rebuild indexes it takes about 10 minutes on a intel 12th gen w/ 32GB RAM, I configured Idea jvm to use 8GB RAM. It happens quite often when I have to add a dependency, somehow Idea project file get out of sync and doesn't update anymore. When opening the project it takes about 1 minutes before being usable. Every time. I basically keep the project opened just in case. I use Idea every day for about 60 different projects on java, kotlin, python, typescript, groovy... Idea is great, its features are much better than Eclipse or vscode, but with the latter I wouldn't have to wait so long when opening projects. Jetbrains want to change UI? Fine, but as a paying customer I would like other things fixed, people working on UI is not working on other fixes to do.

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

#388

Post by bornfreddy »

Retric wrote: post #313
bornfreddy wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, Linus' insistence that kernel developers "don't break userspace." Wait, what? Is that meant as a counterexample?

He wouldn’t say it so often if developers didn’t break userspace.

Gotcha.

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

#389

Post by thund »

oblio wrote: post #291
thund wrote: post #226

Solution: make UI 100% theme-able. Icons, buttons, paddings, borders, fonts, backgrounds, everything as a customizable theme. The community will do the rest.

Well: https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/06/addressing-the-new-u... > The new UI will remain customizable. It is, and will be, possible to change many aspects of the look and feel, such as icons, colors, font sizes, and spacing between controls through theme plugins. We’ll add options as needed to accommodate user preferences, like the ability to customize the toolbar.

We’ll see what “many aspects” means

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

#390

Post by ldng »

0x37 wrote: post #206

I really like the new UI (and all the other similar modern UIs) and I just can't pretend like I dont. I'm a very visual and a design oriented person and I want my tools to look good. If I'm going to spend countless hours using a product/tool I want to enjoy it's looks as well. Too many tools in my opinion are designed by people who want to maximize productivity with very utilitarian and practical user interfaces (whi…

Beautiful on top of productive and utilitarian : yes.

Beautiful instead of productive and utilitarian : absolutely NOT.

Post reply on HN