Luckily, they still support the text editor + CLI tools workflow so I can still use Emacs effectively.
A History of IDEs at Google
61–70 of 333 posts
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#62"the advantages of having a single, extensible platform become even more obvious" -- imagine the impact that could be unlocked if we got the Android and Chromium workflows into CiderV/Critique! The article is framed around "all Googlers" but there is still a very large contingent of Googlers who cannot use these tools.
I would imagine Android development, with its reliance on simulators for local UI testing, is pretty complicated to shoehorn into a web-based IDE? I think cloud-based IDEs would only really work for anything for which a text or web-based UI suffices. (Which is already quite a lot: that covers code, logs and web pages.)
For anything with native UIs, I suppose you could "remote desktop" into an app or a simulator running in the cloud but at that point you might as well run that locally and cut out all the issues introduced by networking.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#63Real IDEs are built by Jetbrains.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#64The advantages of a single platform are as obvious as the disadvantages. In that they are often whatever you want to frame them as for a narrative. I do think Google will continue to get results out of their tooling, as long as they are investing in the tooling. But that is not zero cost. Is it worth it for what they are doing? Largely seems to be. But it isn't like they are that much more successful at software proj…
> But it isn't like [Google] are that much more successful at software projects than any other company? I re-read this several times trying to figure out where the irony was hidden. But... it's not there?
Do they have more success in software products than other companies, though? Most of the software many of us know from them, were acquisitions. They still do heavy acquisitions. Notable that they have double the acquisitions of Amazon. They are on par with IBM. A colossal amount of money spent to make things happen.
So, again, are they that much more successful at software than other companies? They have more hilarious flops than any other company.
Don't get me wrong. I still use some of the stuff. I don't hate them. I don't even think they are particularly bad at things. I just don't think they are any more successful than other software companies. Specifically at the software side of it.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you even put all of google3 on local disk if it were allowed?!? You'd need quite a RAID array. I suspect it'd be almost impossible in practice.
There's no reason to pull the entire repo just to build one project. Do you pull all of GitHub to your disk?
From the user interface perspective though, it does essentially look like you've pulled all of google3 into your disk.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#66Was there 2009-2014 and then again 2020-2026. I think there are a lot of aspects of IDE use and culture at Google that this post omits. My recollection from 2009-2011 is that emacs and vim were the dominant editors (just as the TV show Silicon Valley depicted), and there was a decent-sized minority using Eclipse and Intellij, both of which had official support for Google tooling. The command line still largely ruled…
I can't check when Cider got started. I was probably wrong (it wasn't much used in my circles at that time), I'll update the post.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#67Meanwhile Google acquired windsurf, released antigravity, and recently handicapped it for Google business workspace users by removing the AI Ultra plan for workspace. So the only real way to use antigravity is either being a Google employee or using a personal account and AI Ultra. https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/gemini/ai-ultra...
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Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#68Was there 2009-2014 and then again 2020-2026. I think there are a lot of aspects of IDE use and culture at Google that this post omits. My recollection from 2009-2011 is that emacs and vim were the dominant editors (just as the TV show Silicon Valley depicted), and there was a decent-sized minority using Eclipse and Intellij, both of which had official support for Google tooling. The command line still largely ruled…
How many new googlers use vim or emacs do you think? I can imagine at least a small amount of new vim people since vim will always be popular, but I would love to know if more than a handful of new googlers a year use emacs
I joined gdm recently, and previously used (neo)vim exclusively. Begrudgingly Cider-V is very, very good. It might be possible to get by without it, but the system is so locked down you’re going to make a lot of sacrifices. (very few authorised extensions, codebase is so large it’s going to break whatever tools your used to using anyway, no git)
I’m well thinking I may as well trade my brick of an m5 pro for a 13” chromebook, it’s a strange time.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#69The advantages of a single platform are as obvious as the disadvantages. In that they are often whatever you want to frame them as for a narrative. I do think Google will continue to get results out of their tooling, as long as they are investing in the tooling. But that is not zero cost. Is it worth it for what they are doing? Largely seems to be. But it isn't like they are that much more successful at software proj…
> But it isn't like they are that much more successful at software projects than any other company? They are still largely an ads company, no? They have a ton of other software in 2026. And they have a pretty diverse (and diversifying) income stream today. Like 30-40% from non-ads. Is it worth it? That’s for them to say, but they can ramp up cloud services at scale pretty fast as a core competency.
I mean, ads is 73% of revenue. Of the rest, ~60% is Cloud, ~35% is hardware and subscriptions and app store fees.
So, sure, lots of spots for software there. But still nothing that would make me think of them as a software company. Or, worse, a lot of software that I don't have a strongly favorable view on. :D
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#70> a team dedicated to the IntelliJ integration was formed around 2015 I don't know which team that was, but to add to that, official support for IntelliJ at Google started quite a bit earlier. I was the second person to join a team writing IntelliJ plugins. We wrote a Blaze plugin not too long after Blaze launched, as it was becoming more popular. Google tells me that Blaze launched in 2006, so I think it must have b…
I'm not sure about the dates.
At some point (2014?), the use of IntelliJ was discouraged in favor of Eclipse. One year later or so, the decision was reversed and the effort focused on IntelliJ (and Eclipse were considered deprecated).