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Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI

neil.computer

221–230 of 420 posts

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

#221
I think I can get used to both the new UI and the old one, as personal preference doesn't really matter that much.

That being said, I really agree with the text that the design to be chosen should be based on A/B testing and whether the design improvement leads to an improvement in productivity.

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

#223
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just Reddit, Gmail also got worse with time. Even now when I look at Gmail 2004 I find it superior to the current UI.

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.

Hence so many open source revival project of that UI. SerenityOS and many themes for open source desktops have a win95/win98(SE) look.

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

#224
Interesting timing given that they are half way done getting their own extensions to Jetpack Compose out. They have compose desktop and compose web now. Unfortunately, they seem to not have a compose IOS (which would make it a nice alternative to Flutter). And compose desktop still has a runtime dependency on the jvm even though the underlying graphics library is based on Skia, which is also used by Chrome. Given that Jetbrains has native compilers for Kotlin, this is a bit odd and maybe something they are looking to address over time.

So, this makes me wonder about the timing for this and the technical architecture. Are they eating their own dogfood here? Or is this a separate thing?

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

#225
post #176
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forget what VSCode is doing. Except for remote development extension. Do that. It's the killer feature of VSCode.

Why would one do remote development with laptops being as powerful as they are today (think: the raw power of an M1 Mac Book Air even).

7950x

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

#227
post #89

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…

> 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. We are not fine with it. It really sucks. It's just out of our hands. To this day I hate the gmail interface. It used to be so much better back in the day.

> We are not fine with it

I actually really like it. I've been looking at IntelliJ for 8 years, the refresh is really very welcome XD. I also haven't noticed any lost functionality.

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

#228

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…

[deleted]

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

#229

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…

> I don’t mind a UI refresh

Sadly it’s not actually just a UI refresh but a UI downgrade because they’ve actually removed key functionality, not just tweaked some visual styling.

It’s a completely different tool window layout mechanism with far fewer tool windows that can be open at the same time. I rely on having my source control, embedded terminal, problems window, commit window + more all simultaneously visible. It’s key to my workflow to have a number of key windows open and their new layout throws this all away.

So far its the most disruptive and user hostile “UI refresh” I’ve ever seen and will see me moving back to Visual Studio if they persist with it.

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

#230
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can't possibly call yourself a "professional developer" (and it sounds like you're not pointing out that you're paid for the work, but that you're a "pro") and then talk about debugging as something you rarely do. If debugging (with a debugger) is something you rarely do, you may be paid for your work, but I wouldn't call you a pro. You should be debugging alongside development to gain deep understanding and redu…

That’s a fine opinion to hold, until you work on applications that you cannot debug for one reason or another.

As a fellow debugger lover, having to basically use log statements instead of being able to reach in and debug was a rude awakening. Some people probably don’t know that debugging can be easy with the right combination of IDE and language. Or the billion software layers mean that the debugger fails to attach for some reason which can’t be figured out.

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