I'm a big fan of the way JetBrains sells their licenses. Like a lot of software companies nowadays, they only sell licenses on a subscription basis. But with a very customer-friendly clause of where if you pay for a subscription for 12 months you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed. And then after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you also get a perpetual license for that particular version and so on and so forth.
True; that's the only subscription model I find acceptable for software that hardly changes in meaningful ways. For example, I refuse to upgrade Git Tower to version 3 as a protest against fournova's new licensing. Up to that point, I was a loyal customer and product advocate, basically buying every upgrade anyway, but by my own choice. Instead, I'll be on version 2 "forever", despite all its flaws. It was even worse for Windows users, who bought licenses (on my advice, sometimes...) for a thing that realistically speaking never came out of beta. To have a usable product to begin with, they suddenly needed to pay for a subscription. There was zero response to my email explaining this, so there's that. Now I'm keeping my eyes open for alternatives.
Emacs is free and in my opinion Magit is far, far superior to Tower / Fork / SourceTree (used them all on mac extensively at some point; out of those, fork is pretty nice and lightweight).
I'm not an emacs user but always install it (via spacemacs) everywhere solely to host Magit.
The terminal is the best and only git client you need and it will always be free. You are doing yourself a disservice as a developer by not learning how to use your terminal
I'm not sure about that in the case of git. I used the terminal UI exclusively for a long time but it's so bizarrely designed that I've been interested in using a GUI for a while. There are a lot of reasons a dev should learn to use a terminal but making git more pleasant to use isn't necessarily one of them.
GUIs aren't super flexible but they are good at taking a common flow users go through and making it stupid simple to exercise. A lot of the usage of git should be stupid simple, with only infrequent need for complex interaction. Obviously there are some people out there for which a GUI will never be sufficient for their needs, but I'd argue it isn't the common case.
I'm typically a heavy terminal user. Git is my exception. a) the UI of git cli is just so terrible that I'd rather fill my brain with more important things, and b) for viewing what's changed, `git diff` just doesn't cut it relative to a GUI.
Sourcetree is my go to git client, but if I couldn't use sourcetree I'd be OK with pretty much any git GUI. But git CLI is reserved for particularly tricky things that GUIs just can't handle well. (And I need to look up the specific flags or commands every single time.)
Just yesterday I noticed a "Fork Activation" option in the Fork menu with fields for an email and a license key. I think you might be right, it won't be free for much longer.
It's a 3 way merge tool that works well with Fork. To be honest I can't say how it compares with other merge tools, I tried a few merge tools some time back and liked P4 best.
I am just replying to say that I have the exact same experience. I love Git Tower and recommended it to many people, but I haven't upgraded to version 3 and likely never will - for the exact reasons that you have lined out. I think FourNova (the company behind it) is probably missing out on quite some cash here...
I switched to Sublime Merge from using Git Tower (their licensing was awful after v3).
Never looking back, SM is amazing.
Git Tower folks: Stop pissing off your paying loyal users. Get a hint, I want my money back because you guys never made v2 properly stable and jumped on v3 for an awful cash grab. Fuck you, kindly.
Sublime HQ is an amazing company. I would pay for their products even if they charged double. Honesty and integrity matters. You’re not selling to normal sheep, programmers are a smart bunch.
Let's list just basic git concepts that you're likely to encounter fairly early on: the working tree, staged commits, branches, remotes, stashes, detached heads, tags, submodules, merge conflicts, squashed commits, fast-forwards, rebasing, cherry-picking.
Some of these you could choose to ignore - rebasing and submodules - but on the whole you need at least a cursory understanding of everything on that list to get by without a git angel to get you out of trouble. I still have a person I phone when anything out of the ordinary happens and I've taught git to other people!
I find that it has too many magic commands built-in so no-one really gets to learn the under-side of what's actually occuring so when it eventually breaks like everything does, you have no idea what you did wrong. An example would be how the git pull command is basically a bunch of different git fetch and merge commands.
Say you want to find a commit that occurred around June three years ago, and look at what the repo looked like after that commit -- without checking out any files. How do you currently do it?
For me, I just Right click -> TortoiseGit -> Show Log -> scroll -> Right-click -> Browse Repository.
How long does it take you? For me it takes < 10 seconds (I just timed myself).
Not against GUI or anything but just curious about doing it from CLI:
git log | grep 'June 2017' (and remember the first 5 characters of hash)
And then `got checkout <hash>`
git log | grep -- find the hash of the one I want. or git log > file and look at it in an editor. no need to change the tools just for this unusual action.
I understand that YMMV -- de gustibus non disputandum est -- but I have ever understood the appeal of GUI tools especially for something like git. I do use magit, but even then I do most manipulation with the command line interface
> git log | grep -- find the hash of the one I want.
This misses the point of the problem -- the point is you don't know precisely what string to grep for.
> or git log > file and look at it in an editor. no need to change the tools just for this unusual action.
I mean, nobody said this 1 reason should be enough to make you switch tools? I was just giving an example.
And no, it's not "unusual" just because you say so to try to dismiss the problem. I know I use Browse Repository as well as the GUI logs pretty frequently, and they're godsends compared to your solution.
And lastly: this is what your solution actually looks like:
1. Dump the entire log output into a temporary file
2. Open that temp file in your editor
3. Look through the commit messages/dates/names
4. Realize that's not quite enough to narrow down your search to a single commit (maybe you want to see the diffs or file paths or something else?)
5. Try to figure out which flags you should to pass to git log to dump all the info you need
6. Call git log again, hopefully now it dumps all the info you need
7. Open the temp file again in your editor
8. Scroll through your file containing diffs/names/whatever extra info you dumped
9. Type 'git checkout COMMIT -- file/path' once you find something
10. (Hopefully,) before you press Enter, realize you're about to trash your current copy of the file, which had some other changes
11a. Run git stash, and now suddenly messing up your staging area that you'd carefully staged changes in, and also messing up the file metadata (e.g. Make will now rebuild everything...), OR
11b. Figure out how to run git checkout-index -a -f --prefix=/destination/path/ so that you check the file out into a different directory.
12. Once you have a copy of that file, look through it, maybe examine/pull out the code you wanted (or whatever)
13. Remove the temporary file you checked out.
14. Remove the temporary file in your editor.
15. git stash pop.
And somehow you always do all the above without making a mistake, otherwise have fun reverting or recovering lost data.
With a GUI log TortoiseGit's log, you literally:
1. Click on a commit with the date you're interested in
2. Select Browse Repository
3. Double-click each file you want to examine to see the diff
4. If it's not the file you want, press Escape and click again.
Not only is the number of steps smaller, each one is also significantly faster, and less risky too. No need to mess with a single temporary file, fire up your editor manually, or risk losing anything.
Anyway, again: this was just 1 example meant to get the idea across, hopefully with the aid of your imagination to extrapolate to other scenarios. But if you're going to trash this all with "this never comes up" I don't really have the energy or interest to keep bringing up examples or try to convince anyone; you should just keep using the CLI.
I don't think a lot of the steps listed in your first example are as painful as you make them about to be. Most of those steps are just as elementary as clicking a button in a GUI to someone with fluency on the CLI. I also doubt the claims that it's that much faster for someone with a lot of experience doing it.
Perhaps you could be faster with the GUI than on the CLI, but learning a GUI doesn't come with zero overhead: you have to understand it's terminology, how it's configuration works, what its icons and symbols mean. Particularly when it comes to VCS management, GUI's like to simplify sometimes complicated or nuanced VCS behavior and you can't really be sure what is being done to your repo until you've pressed the button and done it. Not to mention you are now investing time learning a program that can be abandoned at any time and leave you without the basic knowledge necessary to manage your repo (not saying this would affect you this way, but it could certainly be a reason to not learn it in the first place).
> I don't think a lot of the steps listed in your first example are as painful as you make them about to be. Most of those steps are just as elementary as clicking a button in a GUI to someone with fluency on the CLI. I also doubt the claims that it's that much faster for someone with a lot of experience doing it.
I mean, it's not like you can ever convince me that >10 keystrokes are as fast as 1 click, but regardless, this is easy enough to settle -- just time yourself and let me know how long the steps take you on the CLI.
> Perhaps you could be faster with the GUI than on the CLI
Hence the point!
> but learning a GUI doesn't come with zero overhead:
I don't think anybody claimed this either, so it's fine.
> you have to understand it's terminology, how it's configuration works, what its icons and symbols mean.
It sounds like you haven't used TortoiseGit... at all? How often have you had to look at its manual? How many times have you had to look at the manual of git itself? Honestly, your own reply is warranted here so many times more than it was to me -- "I don't think a lot of the steps are as painful as you make them about to be."
In fact so many of the commands are so obviously self-explanatory (both in text and in icons) that you literally never need to look them up. Stuff that you would never just guess how to do in git itself. Like when you right-click a file in a commit and click "Save revision to...", which also has a floppy next to it. Is it really such a mystery what it does? Is it even remotely comparable to figuring out checkout-index (or whatever the right command is)?
And honestly: it's such a poor attempt at an argument to suggest that the minor ramp-up time of TortoiseGit is somehow not worth the perpetual git pains it saves you from that I don't even know what to say.
> Particularly when it comes to VCS management, GUI's like to simplify sometimes complicated or nuanced VCS behavior and you can't really be sure what is being done to your repo until you've pressed the button and done it.
First, this is such an unnecessary strawman. If you're so worried what some GUI command does, then just use the CLI for it instead.
Second, this is completely irrelevant for read-only operations (like log, Browse Repository, etc.) which were the ones concerned here.
And third... again, it sounds like you're only saying this because you haven't used TortoiseGit, because (shockingly enough, to someone coming from the git CLI) it's not a minefield; in fact it has a number of safeguards. "Commit" creates a commit, "Revert" reverts your changes, "Checkout" checks out a commit, etc... and in fact fails if your tree is dirty, so you don't lose data. Heck, sometimes the git commands it prints end up being more correct than what you'd type on the command line. I know I've learned a fair number of random git features from TortoiseGit.
> Not to mention you are now investing time learning a program that can be abandoned at any time and leave you without the basic knowledge necessary to manage your repo
Again, nobody said you shouldn't learn the CLI. In fact, I'll say it right here: you should definitely learn the CLI, especially for git, before moving to the GUI, or you will be confused (though even then, you'd probably be less confused than you would be if you started with the CLI itself).
> (not saying this would affect you this way, but it could certainly be a reason to not learn it in the first place).
No, it's most definitely not a reason not to learn it.The discussion was never about what you learn in the first place, but what you use. You should learn the command-line regardless. And even regarding usage, it's again a strawman: nobody even suggested you should never use the CLI. The question was "why do people want a graphical git client?" and the answer was "because it makes {tasks} easier", for some tasks. If you find any tasks that don't fall in that category, just use the CLI. It's just a tool after all, not a religion.
> I mean, it's not like you can ever convince me that >10 keystrokes are as fast as 1 click,
I know your reply was to debasarab2 and my upstream comment did say YMMV, but in fact it is a lot faster for me (and likely debasarab2) to type 10 characters than click an icon. My working mode is simply different. We’re not saying you’re wrong, what we’re saying is it’s not universal.
If I Haase to click a button I have to move a hand off the keyboard, shift my gaze, find the mouse pointer, move it, then BT my hand back to the keyboard.
Whereas on a command line I always know where my keystrokes go, I never have to move my hands or look away from the screen, and I have >40 years of typing at computers wired into my basal ganglia. (This is despite the fact that the first computer I used, a CADR lisp machine, had a mouse and bitmap display). GUI interfaces are simply much slower for me, except in very unusual applications. I am not claiming it to be universal but it is clear the affordances of the command line are significantly lower-friction for people accustomed to them.
My hands are on the keyboard most of the time too, I'm not a particularly slow typer, and there's no way I could write a proper git checkout-index command at the speed of just a click or two.
But again: I will believe you if you measure it and report back. So far the only person who's measured anything has been me, and I have to wonder why others are so averse to it.
Yeah, if you consider my arguments to be strawmen, then using a VCS GUI for the narrow use case of tracking down diffs might save you a solid few minutes. That just feels like a drop in the bucket compared to the overall time spent developing. YMMV I guess, depending on what organization/codebase you are working on.
Probably just GitHub (the browser UI). If you want to do it offline or from the command line, I understand why you might hesitate want to check out files, but stashing in git is extremely easy.
> You remember the hash of your June commit 3 years ago??
...which is what the git log above is there for.
> Web browser... for a local repo? Or do you mean you don't have a solution if your repo isn't on GitHub or you don't have an internet connection handy?
Yeah, local repo. You know, git is not GitHub. :)
> (You should also time yourself on your web interface by the way.)
Just paste the hash commit in the HEAD selector or even in the URL.
Try doing a merge with IntelliJ's 3-way merge UI. It's flippin' fantastic compared to roaming through the files and removing sections between >>>> and <<<<.
Many people are visual. It's a lot easier to see changes, compare diffs, and generally follow the development branches through a GUI instead of through a command line.
I think the main advantage of GUIs in general is a contextual, curated explorability that is often lacking in CLI tools. The GUI is stateful, allows the user to click on things and prod it, and hopefully shows the most frequently used features for that context. This allows even complete newbies to be productive almost immediately.
For something like git, the slightly more visual representation is a benefit to many, too.
I'm not here to knock CLIs, there are a set of tradeoffs to be made, and CLIs win in many cases (flexibility, scriptability, being able to copy snippets you frequently use, etc). The above does tend to hold true, however.
Infamous, and a more accurate description might be that discussions about git are well-known for quickly descending into discussions about whether or not it's intuitive and whether or not that matters since you use it every day you'll soon get it and no longer care that much how intuitive it is anyway.
Well on the face of it, it's a simple tool isn't it? It's a spinning saw blade, and surface(s) against which to rest the wood being cut.
And I've never used one, but I'm sure it takes some learning, skill, and practice to get good cuts the way you need them, e.g. bang on 45deg all the way across for a 'mitred' corner joint. And it certainly needs learning, care, and attention to operate safely.
I don't mean it to be an insensitive analogy - accidents involving table saws are obviously horrendously worse than those involving git.
As someone else mentioned here, the graphical merge tool in IDEA is extremely powerful. Plus keyboard shortcuts to all the main Git actions. It's overall more efficient. However I always use Git IDEA + Git CLI side by side.
Thanks for your thoughts on this, Thijs! Here's Tobias, the CEO of Tower.
We want to make sure that Tower can stay a high-quality application in the long run. This means we want to constantly improve the application, add new features, fix bugs, and help users with great customer support. To be able to do that, we need a steady and reliable source of income. The thruth is: for us - a small, self-funded business - a recurring revenue model from a subscription is the only sustainable way to survive.
A model where the user gets to keep the last version after she stops paying for the product does not work for a small business. If you have a team of 1,000 employees like JetBrains, you might be be able to afford this. But not a 7-person team like ours. For two reasons:
(1) First, it doesn't provide the steady and reliable source of income that we depend on. It's the old one-time payment model of the past - which we tried and which did not pay the bills for us in the long term.
(2) Second, and maybe more importantly: very quickly, there are lots of different old versions of the product out there. People want bugfixes, documentation and support for their version, no matter if they're currently paying or if they don't anymore. With a 7-person team, we simply cannot do this. We need to focus all of our painfully limited time on _one_ version and make sure to improve that one.
Most of our users make a simple calculation: "Can Tower help me or my team save some time or prevent some mistakes?" Over the course of the next 12 (!) months, even 1 or 2 hours or a mere handful of mistakes would make this worthwhile. If so, Tower has _easily_ paid itself off.
We offer a free and fully-featured 30-day trial that will help you answer this question for yourself - without any risks or commitments.
For the customer, automatically converting long subscriptions to perpetual licenses for an old version is a major safety net (the software will not stop working if I stop paying) and it proves that the vendor is committed to improving the product enough to make upgrades compelling.
On the other hand, reasonable customers do not expect support beyond the latest version and whatever they are currently paying for: "we have fixed that in the latest version, which you should buy" is a valid and honest answer to support issues.
For a tool that can be changed with very little friction like a revision control client, the typical "calculation" about spending money is likely to be waiting for an actual troublesome situation and then get out of it with a short subscription or a 30-day trial.
To summarise, you say you're not offering perpetual licenses for old paid-for versions because you don't feel you can make clear to your customers they don't come with support.
For some reason you do expect you can sell them on this new payment model that benefits mostly you, so it's really not your communicative skills or your customers' capacity to learn that are the problem here. That really only leaves us with the financial advantage to you.
Try SmartGit. I don't know how it compares with Tower, but it is very powerful and easy to use. I like the way it integrates Git features into a consistent view. For example, stashes and reflog commits can be viewed and manipulated in the same log view as any other commits.
They offer both purchase and subscription models, and a free license for open source work. Runs on Mac, Windows and Linux. I've been using it for years and have always been very pleased.
FYI, Git Tower is made by JetBrains is made by 7 people. JetBrains is a company of 1000. Not all software scales to allow that kind of model.
Also, JetBrains can afford that model because the JDK and other software languages are changing and it's not very feasible for their users to stay on an old version for very long.
Switched to Affinity, Photo, Designer and Publisher are pretty awesome and a true replacement for Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Switched 1.5 years ago, never looked back and saved a lot of money in the process. There are a few things it doesn’t have, but its impressive nonetheless. The devs are very committed to speed and anti bloat.
FWIW, I think Adobe actually adds quite a bit to Creative Cloud every year, plus they offer fonts and connections with their mobile apps and such as part of the same price. Creative Cloud today is a very different beast from CS6.
(obdisclaimer: I worked for Adobe several years ago, but have no current stake other than being on the CC photography plan)
Same boat here. I’ll concede that they do add things, but as a pretty small scale hobbyist they don’t add anything I want or need. But they expect me to pay the same full price as a pro user.
I used to buy it every couple of versions or when it went on sale, and that was good enough for my needs. No such luck anymore.
Did a stint on Sketch as well. It’s now gone subscription, but it think it’s the more acceptable “still works but you stops getting updates” type subscription like jetbrains.
What I really want is an Affinity photo library manager like Lightroom. I’ve looked at some currently available options and not been impressed, but there were tweets to the effect that Affinity was thinking about it.
Best I’ve found is “considering it,” but fingers crossed! Seems like the next obvious step after vector illustration, photo editing, and desktop publishing
And I think all the plans come with cloud storage which syncs across devices.
I fought the subscription plan for LR, but realized I usually updated yearly and had this complicated file management system for my photos. For $120/year I have the latest LR versions on all my devices and only have to worry about true backup.
I do keep an eye out for a LR replacement, but I haven't found anything that comes close to LRs file management.
Intuit Quickooks is same way. Hasn’t substantively changed in 20 years but they stop you from importing new data if you don’t update to latest every 3 years. They need some real competition.
I upgraded to version 3 but feel like they haven't made a product improvement since, despite the new subscription model. Staging of chunks still remains the killer feature to keep me with it but I'd be happy to switch (pay) if anything else came along.
It’s interesting to see quite a few others in here had the same struggle with upgrading to tower 3 as I had a year (or 2?) ago.
Then I moved to vscode with it’s git integration and that works just as good.
>But with a very customer-friendly clause of where if you pay for a subscription for 12 months you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed. And then after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you also get a perpetual license for that particular version and so on and so forth
This came about due to a decent amount of consumer backlash, if I recall correctly. They used to sell standalone perpetual licenses which included a period of updates.
Or.. JetBrains went ahead with a disliked move, then took a half-step back. There's still a half-step in the wrong direction remaining, on top of showing that they would have been willing to go the whole way if they could have gotten away with it.
Yes, you can make something sound positive when you leave out material facts. They knew an expiring license would be much less popular than a non-expiring one before they did it. So, just saying they listened to their customers leaves out the very important detail that they ignored their customers the first time around.
Still commendable given how common it is these days for companies to get consumer backlash and just continue to do the same thing while comically trying to publicly convince the customer base that the new model is somehow better for them when any rational person can see it isn't.
Also useful as a guide to show the customer they should go ahead and voice their displeasure when these situations arise, preferably before the product is so entrenched in the given market that they can "pull an Adobe" in this situation ("Don't like the new terms? Fuck you, pay us").
A huge part of the backslash actually happened here on HN when they originally proposed the pure (like Adobe and 90% of other companies) SaaS model.
So Jetbrains model is an improvement over most other companies but it is not as consumer friendly as the old licensing model.
I would love to have the old model back(buy now with 12 months of updates) but that ship has sailed.
Sure, it came about due to backlash - but they still listened to their customer base and made changes, quite publicly admitting they had pushed the subscription model too far.
Honestly I’m quite happy with it as a compromise, especially with the All Products Pack - I save money every year than when I used to buy upgrades for IntelliJ and ReSharper stand-alone, and JetBrains has incentive to keep pumping out new features to keep me from deciding to utilize my fallback license.
I don't think Jetbrains gets any money directly by the usage of Kotlin on Android, as Kotlin too is open source, and works very well in IntelliJ Community (also open-source). In fact, I don't think IntelliJ ultimate has any extra Kotlin features.
IntelliJ Ultimate has a lot of extra features, yes, but I don't recall any of them being related to Kotlin, or Android, so I don't think the parent comment claiming kotlin usage will result in extra revenue is relevant.
> They used to sell standalone perpetual licenses which included a period of updates.
I'm missing something. What's the difference between that and what they're doing now? You pay $X, you get a perpetual licence and updates for a limited period.
Your perpetual license is for the oldest version available during your subscription period, not the newest.
Old model: Pay $X.XX and get one year of updates.
New model: Pay $X.XX (spread over 12 months) and you can use all new versions UNTIL the subscription ends. At which point, unless you renew, you have to DOWNGRADE to the one year old version.
Let's face it, downgrading such an import tool is not something developers will be comfortable with (especially since JB products occasionally have show-stopping bugs).
Having said that, I'll admit to liking their products (and support). But the model is not as generous as everyone seems to think.
IIRC, the price of 2 year subscription is still cheaper than the 1-year update of the old model. They even offered subscription discount when they were transitioning, so the out-of-pocket is still cheaper than the old model.
So that was the original plan but I believe they changed to the “more reasonable” one after the backlash (so you get the current version + 1 year of updates)
Why does this matter? Yes, their original plan was pure SaaS. But they listened to criticism and changed it once they realized that there was backlash from the community. If anything, that should be admired not criticized.
> Why does this matter? Yes, their original plan was pure SaaS. But they listened to criticism and changed it once they realized that there was backlash from the community. If anything, that should be admired not criticized.
It's useful context. Yes, it's good that they listened to their customer base - and I've not criticised the current subscription model.
But I still think it's relevant and on-topic to point out that the previous model was more generous and they tried to do full-SaaS when reading the parent comment in isolation sort of suggests they did this out of the goodness of their hearts (and entirely unprompted).
It's matter, because even in this thread you have people prizing jetbrains for beign better than Adobe SaaS, but in reality jetbrains would go even futher than any big predatory corporation out there to vendor lock you into their set of tools.
If you have an option, stick with open tools with strong community support. Just observation: with commercial tools you don't have full control of your own work, nuff said
Now the perpetual licensed version always lags 12 months behind in updates, i.e. you do not have a perpetual license for the past 12 months worth of updates at the time your subscription runs out.
This is incorrect. Lots of people believe this but it just isn't true.
When your one-year subscription expires you actually have a perpetual license for the first version that was available when you signed up. NOT for the last one available when the contract ended.
In other words, when your one year subscription is up, you have to downgrade to a one year-old (possibly buggy) version.
For more mature toolchains like C or Java, this seems reasonable. For ones that undergo massive updates each version (WebStorm, AppCode) it's a non-starter.
EDIT: on second read, this may have been what the parent poster was trying to say. I'm leaving this comment as-is though because there seems to be a TON of confusion about this point.
On second read, you might be right so I amended my comment... In my defense, OP's comment is ambiguously worded. What you actually get is a permanent license to the oldest release available during your subscription. OP also says:
>... after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you also get a perpetual license for that particular version and so on and so forth."
Also kind of unclear. And judging by the comments here, many many people misunderstand this. I think it's a general expectation that you'd get access to most up-to-date version of the product when your subscription ends. Not the version from the day your subscription started.
Think about it. If there's a bad bug or regression in the old "perpetual" version you aren't entitled to the subsequent bug fixes. Bug fixes which you've been "using" for the past year. It's kind of a hard thing to swallow.
You get the latest version you subbed to. So if you subbed last in 2018, you get that version. If resubbing j. 2019, the 2019 version. Also every year the price goes down, so you pay less and less.
That's misleading. Each year has multiple point releases. You don't get the latest point release.
My PHPStorm subscription expires in less than a week. In order to continue using it (without re-subbing), I have to downgrade from 2019.3 (current release) to 2018.3 (the release available on the date I subbed). Software that is one year old.
Similarly, the JetBrains site says my WebStorm subscription expires in around 10 months. At which point I have to downgrade to 2019.2 if I don't re-sub. Today's current version is 2019.3.
>Also every year the price goes down, so you pay less and less
That part is true and it's certainly commendable that they do that.
I recently renewed my PHPStorm subscription (again). Not because there are hot features released in the past year which I'd miss.
Rather, I thing it is right thing to do - to pay some recurring cost for the software we use and to let the developers of that software to make their buck.
We are too accustomed to get everything for free at the expense of someone else.
Plus in all honesty, lots of Adobe software behaves like a virus by installing these always running updaters. I haven't had Flash in my laptop for sometime and the web has evolved to a point that it was never an issue, but the CC updater ended up saying I needed to install the latest update to Flash.
I have already tried Pixelmator and the Affinity suite, but after that shady behavior plus the monthly fee, I ended up uninstalling anything Adobe based and just switched completely to Affinity Design and Photo. The only thing I'm missing is when somebody sends me an .ai file in a certain format, but if they export with SVG or with PDF support, zero issues there.
I'm amazed you think that way. It's a huge step down, and incredibly customer hostile. I stopped giving JetBrains money when they switched. If there's no perpetual licence, I'm not buying.
In the old world, you bought the latest version, got upgrades for a year - sometimes more, then got a discount on upgrading come a newer version. At any time you stopped paying you kept the latest software, in sync with everyone else. You'd slowly move out of step.
In JetBrain's fabulous con you pay a sub for the latest, and if you decide to stop paying - almost certainly having paid markedly more during the duration of your sub than under the old model - you get shunted to an older version, instantly putting you at least a year out of step with everyone else.
This is a terrible terrible business model despite good intentions. Let me explain... Vast majority of developers who can pay are living in corporate world where you need to approve expenses each time charge is made. Subscription model is especially bad in that world because PO approvals for subscriptions are usually very hard, at least requiring additional justifications + process barriers. Most folks would just rather not do it or find alternatives. I've seen this first hand even when folks are very fond of product.
A far better licencing model is to have one time charge and free upgrades for a year followed by nagging that can be turned off. This would have exact same effect but much easier to have purchase orders pass throughs in big company rule books.
JetBrains have far more potential than $270M. One of the easiest thing they can do is to allow users in same companies to form user groups on their website. They can then approach those companies to buy site licenses with list of all these supportive users at those companies. They can then evangelize to users within same companies who are not yet using their products. This would make sure their subscription churn is lowered due to individual developers.
I understand the business reason for the licensing model so I don't really hold it against them, but after a couple years of 'Oh, you want fixes for these bugs we introduced recently? You'll have to buy another 12 months' where they constantly kept breaking new things when landing important fixes, I got fed up with the treadmill and just stopped using their products (in my case, ReSharper and dotTrace). I'd get problems like "having ReSharper for C# installed breaks VC++ compiles" (yes, really) and very often they'd just close the bugs outright or tell me the fix was only in the upcoming paid version with its own new bugs.
I feel like this is the downside to the subscription license model - if you want to use the product at all you have to keep paying unless the version you've currently got is somehow perfect. And in the case of JetBrains products I've used, it is not. I wish companies like this offered something like an LTS branch where I could pay (subscription even!) for a version that just actually works instead of constantly having to put up with new features/bugs just to get fixes for workflow issues.
Honestly, I don't really have a problem with subscriptions generally if it's a product that I use regularly. (Modulo "reasonable" pricing of course.) Where I have an issue is when I need a product I rarely use any longer to open an existing file or do some once in a blue moon task.
At some point, software stops working with OS upgrades etc. anyway and I can deal with that. But I don't want to pay a subscription for something I use a couple times of year and don't need the latest version of.
If I remember correctly when they first announced they were moving to a subscription based model a few years ago years ago there was a backlash from customers and they listened to customer complaints and modified the model to be what it is today. Another plus to them in my book for doing that.
Same here. I wish everyone company with a subscription based licensing model did it this way. It should be noted though, when Jetbrains initially decided to move to this type of licensing, it was a bit different and they got a lot of backlash from existing users (including myself), but credit to them for listening and amending it to something better for customers.
I've been a happy customer and Resharper user for many years and it makes my life much better, so it's great to see the company doing well.
Totally agree. I thought Adobe's offer would be just as good until I cancelled early and got bit in the arse. I basically paid more money to cancel than what I would have paid if I left the sub open, and of course I lost access once I did cancel. Total asshole design there.
I go back to JetBrains and now I basically have to use their IDE because my company does, and it's not very easy to get the same kind of experience with Java with Vim or Emacs.
I'm using CLion to help me learn C++ because it knows C++ better than I do (and on a Mac I'm not using Xcode for writing C++, only building it). For £10-£20 a month, that is discounted every 12 months, with full ownership of the last version you had... it's great. They seem to handle it a lot better than Sketch as well, who will force you to find the download page for old versions. IntelliJ just seems to give you what your license allows.
I'd still go back to emacs in a pinch but I'm not proficient enough with C++ or Java and those ecosystems to know how to set my environment up.
JetBrains seem to have a pretty fair and solid strategy and it must be doing well enough for them to expand their IDE-base so far.
I'm curious about the counterfactual here. If they had a VC on their board, they may have been "gently guided" towards a pure subscription model since SaaS valuations are much higher.
But, it sounds like a pure switch to SaaS would have alienated customers and perhaps would have forced more users to seek alternatives, and we might not have seen the business as this scale today.
As others have mentioned, the fallback license is for the point releases you have paid 12 months for, not the most recent release during your subscription (which is what your comment suggests).
It’s also worth noting that the requirement is 12 consecutive months. You can’t have any breaks so you need to be actively subscribed to take advantage of this.
It’s not the best solution (I am a fan of pay for a year (prepaid or monthly) and you get 12 months of updates where you keep all of them), but it’s a good compromise in the era of SaaS. And a compromise I’m willing to make for their IDEs.
That's still the good thing. Can change the narrative to "developer tools company listens to its customers and gives them a fair deal". The effect is amoral, even if the cause is moral.
Also the core of their main product, IntelliJ IDEA, is open source. And it's actually pretty usable for Java and Scala development for example, which is my interest in it.
The Ultimate version comes with bells and whistles, but truth be told I'm only paying for it because of how happy I am with it.
Interesting... the problem with this model is that investors / the market value SaaS revenue way higher than revenue from perpetual licenses, for a variety of reasons. Although I guess that doesn't matter when you're not raising or public :)
I was using their RubyMine editor for a few years and really liked it but then I switched jobs and ended up using vscodium and found it did basically everything I needed but was free.
I agree with many of the other posters: JetBrains has succeeded because their products are generally awesome, and I am a happy personal subscriber. People should especially remember what the Java IDE landscape looked like when they first came out with IntelliJ: using IntelliJ after using NetBeans or Eclipse was like using Google for the first time after being familiar with AltaVista - it was just a night and day better product.
Still, I wonder if they could have been successful without funding if they were a US or Western European company. Especially in the early days, I'm sure the much lower salaries in Prague allowed them to be more competitive with a lower burn rate. My point is I think their VC-less success would have been much more difficult in a place with higher salaries and cost-of-living.
>I'm sure the much lower salaries in Prague allowed them to be more competitive with a lower burn rate
It's a russian company with the most people (especially engineers) in St. Petersburg. It's only technically registered in Prague. They have only 50 people there. And around a thousand people distributed across Russia (St. Petersburg, Moscow, Novosibirsk), Munich, Boston and brand new office in Amsterdam.
Prague is mostly sales. Although, some engineers wanted to live there so they do. SPb is the main engineering office. Munich is somewhat smaller, but has more high profile employees. Moscow is like 20 people who need to live in Moscow.
That Cold War mentality is getting old already. The world has a lot more to gain if we drop the "my approach is superior" in the process. Russia and China is not filled with demons, and much of the same things they are being acused of can be said of the US, from severe human rights violations in Guantanamo, migrant populations and pretty much being involved in almost every war out there while destabilizing countries that do not follow Washington's views in the process.
But there is no way I'll let all of those issues start affecting me with an anti-American attitude, and all the same I won't be having an anti-Russian or anti-Chinese attitude. First, I don't have anything to gain. I think China is making the best price/value phones out there at the moment, Russia has JetBrains and some good tools like Yandex for Domains which is free, and the US, well Google/Android/Apple you name it.
In a way it is like the console wars. Instead of going with Nintendo against Sega, just get both consoles and be happy.
Russia and China's citizens are not demons or angels, their moral character, I'm sure, is comparable to anywhere else. But... the governments of those countries wield absolute power over those people. The moral character of the people is irrelevant.
While they may employ engineers mostly in Russia I think the company is incorporated in Prague (EU) and the CEO and head office are there which limits the ability of the Russian government to tell them what to do.
Russia is a malevolent authoritarian regime. Russian companies (like Chinese companies) have no power to resist the dictates of their authoritarian governments. I don't trust anyone completely, but democratic countries where government authority is checked/constrained by the people and competing forces are far more trustworthy.
At least some of Jetbrains' offerings are open source. If you have security concerns, you may be able to alleviate some of them by your own examination.
I'd also encourage you to consider separating your concerns about the Russian government and individuals living in Russia, just as you might other governments and their citizenry.
> At least some of Jetbrains' offerings are open source. If you have security concerns, you may be able to alleviate some of them by your own examination.
Good points
> I'd also encourage you to consider separating your concerns about the Russian government and individuals living in Russia, just as you might other governments and their citizenry.
I do separate them, in a moral sense. But in a practical sense, Russian companies can't really be separated from their authoritarian government. What can they do to resist? There are no checks and balances. To be fair, Jetbrains was probably even around before Russia even started to settle definitively into its current authoritarian predicament. But thanks to the Putin regime, how on earth can they be trusted?
In a practical sense, how could JetBrains' software compromise security? People don't generally deploy build artifacts built from IDEs. And I suppose you could turn on a network monitoring tool to see if JetBrains software is broadcasting anything.
Access to developer workstations (and all their permissions) is desirable on its own, even if you aren't modifying the specific projects they are working on.
Telemetry features (on by default) can/could be used to obfuscate nefarious network chatter.
> I'd also encourage you to consider separating your concerns about the Russian government and individuals living in Russia, just as you might other governments and their citizenry.
That's a big ask, because the Russian government's relationship with its citizenry is very different from the relationship of a free country's government with its citizens. Namely, I am confident that there is substantially zero risk that my country might compel me through extra-legal channels to modify my work product to target a foreign adversary. If they did, I would have many avenues to resist them, including the courts and the free press. But we know that this is not the case in Russia, being that they have neither rule of law nor a truly independent media. And we know that the head of that country is at best a violent and evil man, and so is an entity to be feared by those whose interests are misaligned with his.
So, as much as we might want to, it's not quite possible to separate the risks imposed by the Russian government from individual Russian people.
> And we know that the head of that country is at best a violent and evil man, and so is an entity to be feared by those whose interests are misaligned with his.
I’m not quite sure which country you were talking about?
While I agree with your general point, it just occurred to me that that could be applied to both leaders. It’s the country and the structure of that country that is different (e.g. leaders will change, vs not).
I hate Trump as much as the next guy, but he has not annexed any provinces of Canada or Mexico, nor has he ordered the assassination of journalists or opposition party members. Maybe he would in a different timeline, where the U.S.'s rule of law was as frail as Russia's is. Maybe, although I happen to believe he is not quite that bad. Fortunately we don't live in that timeline, in any case. How evil the guy at the top is matters more to the degree his acts are unconstrained by the rest of the system.
Whataboutism. And, yeah, that was super bad. So, for that matter, was the whole colonial era. But none of those guys are still the leaders of nuclear-capable nation states, so they're a little less relevant than Putin to our prospects going forward.
> are not proven beyond reasonable doubt.
This is not a court of law. My standard for "observing events as likely true on internet comment threads" falls somewhere below "beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt" and somewhere above "preponderance of evidence." But I'd say for these cases we're way closer to the former than the latter.
> Wikipedia link.
On the other hand, Russian nationalists and apologists of Russian politics are sometimes criticised for using allegations of "Russophobia" as a form of propaganda to counter criticism of Russia.[14][15]
The argument here is that USA cannot claim moral high ground when USA is actively committing the same act. Blindly claiming whataboutism without even attempting to refute this argument and is, therefore, a form of intellectual dishonesty.
> This is not a court of law, so that's kind of irrelevant.
It is important to make reasonable arguments in defense of your claims even outside courts of law.
> On the other hand, Russian nationalists and apologists of Russian politics are sometimes criticised for using allegations of "Russophobia" as a form of propaganda to counter criticism of Russia.
This is neither here nor there. This whole argument is inconclusive.
This has been the bet of the company I work for: Contract Engineers in GDL, Mex. Paying 1/3rd the price of SV payments and still getting awesome talent, while being able to provide very competitive benefits for the region.
>remember what the Java IDE landscape looked like when they first came out with IntelliJ: using IntelliJ after using NetBeans or Eclipse was like using Google for the first time after being familiar with AltaVista
You're skipping over several commercial Java IDEs available when IntelliJ first came out: Most notably, Borland JBuilder, which was an excellent product. Symantec had Visual Cafe as well, which was not really in the same league as JBuilder, but still had some magic.
IMHO, JetBrains succeeded by having a product as good as JBuilder (and revving it so it got better quickly) and not cratering as a company the way Borland did.
> Most notably, Borland JBuilder, which was an excellent product.
I switched from JBuilder to IntelliJ in 2002 I think.
JBuilder was good but on oh so expensive, if you wanted the full-featured version! IIRC it was 5 or 10 times the price of IntelliJ.
What blew me away when I tried IntelliJ for the first time, in comparison to JBuilder, was the refactoring tools. For the first time I felt I could safely rename classes and methods and move classes without manually searching my codebase.
I'm an outsider fan. I've attempted to use IntelliJ on multiple occasions, but it just can't really compete with Eclipse as far as my requirements are concerned. But the competition from and innovation in IntelliJ has no doubt made Eclipse better (and modern Eclipse is kind of awesome and just keeps getting better).
I switched from Eclipse to Intellij only three years ago because it actually used to be pretty good but just fell behind too much. Gradle & Spring Boot were the reason I gave up on Eclipse. I just couldn't get a project imported correctly without running into a lot of bugs. So, when a new project came up I just switched over and started using Intellij.
Before that, for doing vanilla maven + Java projects Eclipse was awesome and generally running circles around intellij in terms of performance, which is still something that is off by order of magnitudes in Intellij and something I miss a lot.
Intellij users are always surprised when I bring that up and say it is fine on their machine. And then I point out that 5-20 seconds to run a unit test after a 1 letter code change is obscenely slow compared to Eclipse because it finishes incremental compilation a few ms after you lift your finger and is ready to run your test. Intellij attempted to integrate the Eclipse incremental compiler but it is not used by default and generally not that well integrated. Their compilation strategy depends on a lot of caching, which is hard and frequently gets in an inconsistent state (i.e. your IDE lies to you about things compiling or not compiling), which is why people routinely rebuild their whole project, or worse invalidate caches and restart (a top level menu option because it needs to be).
There are, despite the often very aggressive IntelliJ proponents, many areas where Eclipse beats IntelliJ, and incremental compilation is indeed one of the most important. It is also possibly the most important feature in a Java IDE. Ctrl+s and you know the whole codebase is compiled. Go to another file and any code change is available in the code completion (like new or changed methods signatures). Any errors from the change you just saved is shown immediately from across the entire codebase.
I just can't live without a core thing like this missing, and compounded with a number of other things that Eclipse does better, I stay on Eclipse. Unfortunately many younger developers think IntelliJ is all there is.
When's the last time you checked out IntelliJ? It does incremental compilation these days, plus auto-save-and-compile whenever you switch tabs (not just when you save the current tab, which bit me many times in Eclipse; though I haven't used Eclipse in at least four years now), so code completion is immediately updated. I'm pretty sure this has been the case for a few years now.
Yesterday, sorry to say but still off by magnitudes. These things are measured in ms on the eclipse side and in whole seconds on the Intellij side. On a good day it's less than 5 seconds in Intellij. I developed in Eclipse before I switched a few years ago and while it was a bit finicky with gradle, maven support was pretty solid. I never had issues where Eclipse compilation state was wrong for more than a few hundred ms. Basically if it says it compiles it means it compiled without errors, class files exist and when you run something it jumps straight to forking the process with no delay. In Intellij, it takes seconds at best; sometimes closer to 30-60 seconds.
Given that performance is a recurring topic in the Intellij release notes I conclude that they know they still have issues there and they are slowly looking for ways to make things faster. This is not a solved problem.
Part of this is the Kotlin compiler; part of this is indexing; part of this is simply caching logic.
I recently worked on the Elasticsearch code base in intellij. Fast is not a word I would use to describe that. It's a big code base and it clearly was struggling with it. I know some Elastic developers that still use Eclipse basically for this reason.
I'm a contractor working on many projects. Using Eclipse, I can keep my entire universe of all projects I have deployed (about 30 of them), as well as their dependent libraries, as well as every open source project I use and contribute to, open at all times.
I almost never close a project and I never open a project. It's just all there. If I need to use or modify a piece of code, written by me or someone else, it's all accessible to me at all times with a single keystroke.
No project switching. Close to no context switching. IntelliJ doesn't even come close to this kind of power.
I'm like the parent ... Eclipse provides an omniscient view of all my work with instant incremental compilation across all my projects, spanning PHP, JavaScript, Python, Java, Groovy, Kotlin, and more. Run with enough memory it just becomes like another part of my brain.
When I use IntelliJ I feel like I'm using a nice tool with a lot of sweet superficial features but lacking the comprehensiveness and the underlying grunt of Eclipse. It's like driving a Maserati (IntelliJ) vs a SUV (Eclipse). Yeah, I can drive around town pretty quick in a Maserati but for getting real heavy duty work done, it's an SUV every time.
Really interesting description, thanks. How does current Eclipse compare to Netbeans? I currently use vim and VSCode, but in my Java years (10 years ago) I remember moving from Eclipse to Netbeans mainly for the form builder and because of performance.
It's bean so long since I used NetBeans that I can't make a good comparison unfortunately. I do know it never surpassed eclipse for me but some of the reasons for that were probably circumstantial at the time (eg: whole team was using eclipse, etc).
Yeah, tried that. Multiple times. IntelliJ just doesn't handle it performance wise, and it feels awkward because IntelliJ just isn't designed as well for working on multiple projects simultaneously. It's probably great for people working on a single project with some dependencies (modules). IntelliJ really wants you to open a project, work on it, then you close it and open the next project. That doesn't fit me.
Doesn't mean IntelliJ is bad, it's just a bit limited in that regard.
My dozens of projects are not a single project with "modules". I have a universe of code in multitudes of interrelated projects, closed source and open source. I want to refactor openly, not having to care how I'm moving code between projects. Eclipse works perfectly for this. IntelliJ does not.
You kind of described the exact problem there. You have "plenty of projects with >50 modules". I don't have "plenty of workspaces", just one that contains all my "plenty of projects", almost all of which then depend in some way on a tree of hierarchies also within that workspace.
There are no islands. There's now switching between anything. It's just all my code and dependencies, always open and accessible and instantly available.
Creating a new project in Eclipse then requires no importing of modules on my part, I just create a new project, it's in my workspace and voila—it's now an integral part of my universe of code.
I'm an IJ user and I do this; however I remember eclipse was much better about knowing that you have a dependency also in the workspace and using that when you "go to definition" instead of going to the compiled version.
There is a single Eclipse plugin that keeps me married to that IDE: log4e (http://log4e.de). It makes it a breeze to add logging statements to your code. One click puts start/end statements on all methods. One click lets you log a particular variable. And all the statements are templatized, making it dead simple to ensure your logging adheres to your company's logging standards. I WISH this plugin (or something comparable) was available for IntelliJ or even NetBeans. I'd drop Eclipse in a heartbeat.
You might be on to something but their product philosophy just seems to be.. different. Compare TeamCity to Bamboo; it's in a different league. Maybe that does come down to the extra human resources they can throw at stuff.
Their products are/were ambitious in an MVP environment.
Some TeamCity details are a bit odd, for example you are not allowed to run a development server and a production server with one license. Instead you should get an evaluation license, that is only valid two months at a time.
Conditional build steps have been requested by users for years and even though it's the most requested feature, nothing has happened for years.
Like Jenkins, Bamboo, TFS, VSTeam, TravisCI, CircleCI, GitLabCI, UrbanCode?
Maybe it's just me, but the CI/CD space is pretty crowded these days, and Jenkins is still #1 for a reason.
I don't find myself fighting TeamCity as much these days but there's alot if things I wish it could do better.
In fairness I have only tried Jenkins, CruiseControl and Azure DevOps.
What sets TeamCity apart is the use of Kotlin. You do have to invest a fair amount of time to get the most of it, but when you do the return is great.
Putting together a pipeline in Azure DevOps with tons of YAML is not a great experience.
As far as Jenkins is concerned I think that it's biggest selling point is that it's free.
Jetbrains products are awesome though. I used to use a heavily customized vim which was a pretty good setup, but the things a jetbrains ide can do are just much better than what my custom setup could do. I pay for a personal subscription and couldn't be happier. I will recommend everyone to atleast give their products a try. They have a free trial period.
> a jetbrains ide can do are just much better than what my custom setup could do
I get frustrated by people who insist on a complex vi/emacs setup for something Jetbrains IDEs do better out of the box. Or people who insist Sublime is good for editing their complex React project.
I mainly use vim and occasionally use Jetbrains. My setup in vim is super complex. I can tell you exactly how I feel about it:
Vim is a better text editor than anything else. By far. Unfortunately, vim is terrible at basically everything else.
The problem is, once you learn to use vim's text editing capabilities, then editing code using anything else feels like a pain. I'm not talking about variable lookups / etc. I'm talking the pure "move the cursor to a certain place and enter some text" aspect of it. If you don't know vim, then it's hard to understand how slow editing text feels without it - it's kind of like going from not knowing how to type properly to being a solid touch typer. (not that extreme, but that's what it feels like).
Unfortunately, because vim sucks at everything else, my setup has to be complex to actually get it to do the other things a good IDE does out of the box. If I could do it the other way around, I would - I'd love to be able to use vim-like editing inside of an IDE, but every vim-mode I've tried so far just doesn't work properly (except one - evil mode in Emacs - which is why I recently switched to Spacemacs, but that's another story).
> "move the cursor to a certain place and enter some text"
In vscode, I'm usually already looking at the call site of a function I want to edit. So I move the cursor into the function call and hit F12 which takes me to the function definition to edit it. Once I'm done, I hit Alt+LEFT to navigate back to where I was to continue on...
If I didn't start from a call site but I know the file I want to edit - I hit Ctrl+P, type the name of a file, hit ENTER - now I'm in the file, ready to edit it.
To jump to a function, I collapse all functions (Ctrl+K,Ctrl+0/1/2/3/4) and then scroll (or PAGE UP/DN) to find it...then use arrow keys or Ctrl+G to enter the line number. Now I'm ready to edit the function. I might have to hit Ctrl+Shift+] to expand the body of the function.
Alternatively, I Ctrl+F and type the name of the function I want to edit, pressing ENTER to find it...and I'm ready to edit the function.
You're talking about how it's easy to move to a function or a file, and then you're "ready to edit", but edanm is talking about actually doing the editing.
For example: say I jump to this function and want to fix a bug (the `search` should strip off the first two characters here, not just one). So I need to change `regex.search(s[1:], ...)` to `regex.search(s[2:], ...)`:
def compile_hg_glob(line):
pat = glob_to_re(line)
# Mercurial ignore globs are quasi-rooted at directory boundaries or the
# beginning of the pattern.
pat = '(^|/)' + pat
# Mercurial globs also have to match to the end of the pattern.
pat = pat + '$'
try:
regex = re.compile(pat)
return lambda s: regex.search(s[1:] if s.startswith('./') else s)
except:
warn("could not parse hgignore pattern '%s'" % line)
return lambda s: True
If I've just used a fancy shortcut key to jump to this function, my cursor is probably on the function name. In Vim, I'd do `cinr2:<esc>`. Seven keystrokes. I could also do `/[<cr><ctrl-a>` which is only four keystrokes, but a little more awkward to reach. If I tried to do this editing with arrow keys and backspaces I'd need 12 down keystrokes just to get to the right line.
Or suppose I'm looking at this and want to add a `,` character to the end of each of the type entries, because I forgot Python likes its commas:
In Vim I'd press `j` to get to the first entry, then `A,<esc>` to append the `,` after the first one, then `j.` to move down and repeat the action. I then press `j.` a bunch more times (which is really easy to do rapidly with your index and ring finger on Qwerty) and in 2 seconds I'm done. Vim's `.` to repeat the last action is really powerful and can save you a ton of time for small ad-hoc edit repetitions that don't warrant doing a full macro with `q`.
These kinds of things happen constantly, and when you've got Vim burned into your fingers trying to edit text without it (actually edit text, not just jumping to something) feels like typing with oven mitts on.
Or just use the mouse to point and click in the same time. With laptop mousepads it's just moving a finger. Most devs aren't writing that much code and all these Vim efficiencies are vastly overstated.
I've seen many Vim/Emacs-only devs being easily beaten in speed by others using modern IDEs that have tooling and functionality (auto formatting, refactoring, templating, etc) focused on actually getting things done.
Exactly this. I pick type, and I've never found that it feels too slow. I spend more time thinking about the change I want to make, and reading the code to plan that, than actually making the change most of the time. My typing speed wouldn't address the bottleneck. I think vim is the same. Sure you can edit the text faster, but that's not the bottleneck anyway.
Vim was never about typing efficiency. However, it is indeed the best way to navigate and edit text. This statement is very subjective because, just like any tool, it depends on the user. Chainsaw looks ugly, heavy, cumbersome and dangerous to someone who doesn't know how to use it. But with some practice it becomes an incredibly efficient tool. People make ice sculptures using chainsaws.
And I'm not talking about Vim the editor. I'm talking about Vim as an idea. Which is today implemented for pretty much every single [popular] editor and IDE in use. That fact alone is pretty illustrative of awesomeness of the idea of Vim.
And the comment about Emacs is quite disingenuous. I have never been inside a Formula One cockpit, but I can totally get "the job done" with my Camry, because it is totally more efficient for parallel parking.
I have used many IDEs, including InteliJ (which I used for about seven years). Emacs wins solely by its extensibility, no editor/IDE has ever matched its capabilities. For some people that is not an important factor, just like the efficient parallel parking might not be important for Formula One pilots. But when you can automate pretty much anything it feels very empowering and liberating.
Small example: when I'm about the create a new commit, an emacs-lisp script can figure out the current ticket I'm working on (based on currently clocked Org-mode task), generate a branch name based on the ticket description, generate part of the commit message (in the way that it is in compliance with git tool like gommit), I would just have to type the rest of the message.
That is not only more efficient, but also reduces frustration. Compare that with the workflow in any other editor and IDE - most of these steps will have to be manual. Then someone might say: oh there's actually a plugin for Editor X that does some of that stuff for Jira. But what if I join a different company that uses Pivotal Tracker instead? I can extend my emacs-lisp script. Whereas if that's an InteliJ plugin I would either have to go through daunting process of forking and modifying the plugin or submit a feature request and wait for something that may never happen.
I think where the IDE’s are really powerful is when refactoring. Need that one class renamed? File is automatically renamed too, and all references in every file that link to it (instantiations, calls, imports) are updated too.
Exactly, the code structure, navigation and intellisense features are far more useful and let you code at the same level of abstraction as the logic you're coding.
Moving a little bit faster through the text file to edit characters is rarely the issue and I certainly wouldn't give up IDE features for it.
2: select the first :, ctrl+d until all are selected, right arrow, comma
Doesn’t sound any more efficient? Plus, who writes code without an auto-formatter these days? Problem two would have been solved by the linter the moment you wrote that.
It's not just code and linting though - this kind of thing happens when you're editing YAML files, when you're editing pure text, when you're editing CSVs, when you're editing some obscure thing no one's heard of - once you have the primitives down, it's just so easy to apply it everywhere.
This is a bit frowned upon in HN, but may I just say I'm a fan. I'm not sure, but it's likely I got my way of speaking of vim as a language from you, and as you can see in my other comments, it's stuck with me :)
> In Vim I'd press `j` to get to the first entry, then `A,<esc>` to append the `,` after the first one, then `j.` to move down and repeat the action. I then press `j.` a bunch more times (which is really easy to do rapidly with your index and ring finger on Qwerty) and in 2 seconds I'm done. Vim's `.` to repeat the last action is really powerful and can save you a ton of time for small ad-hoc edit repetitions that don't warrant doing a full macro with `q`.
Eh. I'd probably do 'qqA,<esc>j0q', and then '8@q'.
That's also probably not the best example, since that's also trivial if you have an editor supporting multiple cursors.
That's hardcore, I would rarely use a macro for something like that :)
That said, I think multiple cursors are the greatest addition to text editing since, well, vim. I was an enthusiastic user of Sublime Text 1, right before I learned about vim.
Luckily, vim has multiple cursor support, which is... decent. Not great, but decent. I actually think that the only thing that makes multiple cursors more awesome, is being able to combine them with vim's commands, since multiple cursors rely on you being able to do precise things at each cursor, and vim gives you the language for it.
> That's also probably not the best example, since that's also trivial if you have an editor supporting multiple cursors.
Yeah, it's hard to come up with a decent example because I don't even think about it any more, it's just burned into my fingers. I just know how excruciating it feels to edit without Vim (I even wrote that last comment in Vim and then copied it into the browser because writing it in a text field is miserable).
I long ago created a special script (in Macos it's via something called Hammerspoon, I used to have a Windows version).
It basically gives vim-like keys anywhere you want, when holding down the caps lock key. So e.g. caps+h/j/k/l are movement keys.
It goes a lot farther than that: I have a key to delete a line, a key to select a word, a key to go up/down by 4 lines, a key to delete the last word, etc. I even mapped caps+f to jump forward 20 characters (to badly simulate using 'f [letter]' in vim).
This makes so it I never have to leave home position on the keyboard, because while holding caps I have all the movement keys I want at my disposal. It's a total lifesaver, and the only way I can effectively use a keyboard outside of vim :)
>So I move the cursor...What do you do in vim that is far easier?
The part about moving the cursor. Vim users typically don't move the cursor with the mouse but rather with the keyboard. Having to move your hands off the keyboard to reach for the mouse then back is the part that starts to feel sluggish if you get used to not doing it.
Quite the opposite actually, by the time your hand even finds the mouse the vim user will already have jumped to the desired code block and have started editing it.
Having worked alongside longtime vim users, that's almost never the case. There's often more time spent on finding out/remembering the efficient way to get to a particular piece of code. And then there are the inevitable mistakes (oh, I counted give spaces/quotes/paragraphs, but there was one more/one less; oh, I failed to account for some minor thing in my macro etc.).
In a modern IDE you have a multitude of shortcuts and a mouse, and they complement each other.
> Having worked alongside longtime vim users, that's almost never the case. There's often more time spent on finding out/remembering the efficient way to get to a particular piece of code.
Longtime vim users who didn't know how to use vim? That's... interesting.
Reading the parent comment (and being somewhat a vim user) - "move the cursor to a certain place and enter some text" - sounds mostly about the first thing you mentioned - "move the cursor".
Stock vim is mouseless, and without arrow-keys, which means relying on /? (searching) or other keys to achieve the function of arriving at text. CTRL-F never quite matches that (after you hit enter, the CTRL-F dialog is still open, and needs to be closed with ESC or by clicking away), and moving to the arrow keys/pgup/pgdown/mouse is slow.
Having said that - there are some plugins that match this behaviour - I particularly like the ones where a key (f in vimium) highlights each word with a character, allowing for one or two keypresses to jump anywhere on the screen.
I do all of the same in emacs (and vim), and because I use doom-emacs I get all this basically for free without much configuration on my end.
- Go-to-definition is `g d` (with the cursor over the function name in question)
- Project-wide file search is `SPC SPC`
- Jumping to a function is `SPC s i` and then just start typing to fuzzy-match the function name
I stick with this setup because it does pretty much everything I could want from IDEA, and does it without churning up most of the resources on my machine. And trust me, I've tried to switch to IDEA, but it's just too big and too slow, and too poor of an editor for me to actually make the switch.
Even something simple like reading code line by line (and of like me you like to move the cursor as you read the line), and your cursor reached the bottom of the screen, and you want reset the viewport where the line the cursor is on is at the middle of the viewport, is one keystroke ‘M’
The one related function that I would miss is using vimgrep and the QuickFix list to get a list of the locations where the function name appears which I can use e.g. to do a search and replace in those files (or a subset of them)
It's not so much the moving between the files - which vim is terrible at (one of the many things I had to extend in vim in order to get it to work like an IDE). But it's moving and editing within the file itself.
E.g., say you somehow got to a file, and it now has a bunch of functions in it, and you're literally looking at the line you want to edit. To get to that line, there's a bunch of different ways, but you can do this in like 3 key presses. Then, within the line, you can change anything in it really easily.
This sounds weird, so I'll try to give an example. Let's assume you have something like:
Func(self._something, self.something_else).validate, 'Validate exam foundation table')
And let's say you want to change the string that says 'Validate [...]' to say 'Change is good!!'.
To do that, once you've gotten to the line, I'd probably hit two key presses that mean "go to the first open quote in the line", then I'd hit the keys that mean "delete everything inside of the quote character", then I'd type what I want. All in all, I'd be typing these characters before actually writing what I want to write: f'ci' (so, 5 characters).
That probably looks either idiotic or daunting - but the idea of vim is that it's a language - you are literally thinking in your head "go to that quotation mark", then tell vim to do that and it does. Then you're thinking "delete everything inside of these quotations", and it does it. The distance between thinking what you want to do and doing it is almost zero - it's as close as you can get to literally telling someone exactly what to do.
If you're using a non-vim editor, you'd probably have your cursos in the begining of the line, and have to do "cmd+right" several times to skip over words in order to get to the first word of the string, then have to "shift+cmd+right" to get to the end of the string, then write what you want.
There might also be some small annoyances - the last shift+cmd+right might take you over the last quotation mark, and you'd end up selecting the closing paren as well. In vim - that doesn't happen, you're saying exactly what you want to have happen.
Or you might want to undo this change - in vim, it's always hitting "u" once, because in vim, changing the string to something else is an atomic motion. In another editor, you might have to undo a few words at a time, or maybe not - it's not always predictable. And since it's atomic in vim, it's also easy to re-apply the same action to another string - so changing another string to the same thing is a simple matter of hitting "." on it.
And of course, this is just a tiny example. It's easy to dismiss as trivial or unimportant - these are tiny savings of time, after all, and even if you add it up, I doubt the "time saved" in doing things more efficiently is worth much.
But once you know this language for telling an editor exactly what to do, then using an editor that doesn't speak that language just feels super slow - it feels like you are not able to communicate properly, and suddenly, what used to be zero gap between thinking and doing, takes a long time.
> If you're using a non-vim editor, you'd probably
Double-click the word to select it, and start typing right away.
> it's as close as you can get to literally telling someone exactly what to do.
I usually tell someone "Change the word 'validate' to 'something else'". SO i grab my mouse/trackpad, and get there in one click (or double-click).
> It's easy to dismiss as trivial or unimportant - these are tiny savings of time, after all
You should observe most of these "savings" in real life. There's rarely a time when I can't do stuff with code faster than a Vim user. Because by the time the vim user has typed the required sequence of letter, or counted which line/symbol/mark to go to, or wrote a macro correctly, I'll have finished all I needed to do using IDEs built-in capabilities and/or a mouse.
I wanted to say exactly that. I've never been a big fan of vim plugins in IDE's, even though I still prefer them over no vim bindings. The VS code or Eclipse vim bindings are 'not great' at best, for example. But CLion + vim plugin is actually very good: it uses my .vimrc, doesn't mess up undo/redo, supports things like block select in visual mode, etc. The only downside is that it interferes with some standard CLion keybindings (which is inevitable I guess), so you have to remap some things.
Out of curiosity is the plugin just called vim or what? I've been craving getting back to using vim style controls to edit text (and use CLion when working with Rust) so would be interested in at experimenting with this.
It also has two popular vim packages, surround and easymotion you can use too, which I really like.
I then customize all the IDE stuff to vim combos.... super nice.
only PITA is in some drop downs on a number of jetbrains products is that it doesn't play nice with auto hotkey, I have ALT-J and ALT-K bound to up and down arrow keys which makes for a much nicer vim experience when dealing with autocomplete drop downs ( or any drop down )
Was going to chime in to say the same, the VIM plugin in Intellij is hands-down the best vim emulation I've seen. It takes your vimrc as `.ideavimrc` and fucking works.
Been paying for Intellij for nearly a year now and I don't regret a day of it. Well okay, I do regret the one day EAP was totally broken by the VIM plugin, by besides that it has been brilliant.
Of course. I don't even know if I'm actually more productive in editing text.
I just know that subjectively, going from speaking a language with powerful concepts, to using the super crude tools available in most editors, just feels sluggish.
I highly doubt it was actually a good investment time wise to master vim, but I salary really enjoy messing with editors so it was partially for fun.
I always wonder how good and productive people who claim this are in reality. Personally I consider typing as a strong bottleneck for my productivity. I type all the day, and the less time I waste on transfering my thoughts into commands, the more time I have for focusing on the important parts. Not all typing is for textediting, but editors like vim&emacs are not limited to textediting.
The vim emulation for the IntelliJ tools worked very well for me. Used to use only vim with a complex setup. Have been using Goland, and IntelliJ for about a year now.
I actually haven't tried it (just started using PyCharm again very recently). But I gave it a go right after posting my comment.
And like almost every other emulation I've ever tried, within 1 minute, I found 5 things that didn't work correctly. And I'm not exaggerating here - I literally spent 1, maybe 2 minutes and found 5 things.
I'll have to use it for a while to find out whether it's just a few minor annoyances, or much worse than vim.
Can you briefly enumerate some of them here? I'm a casual vimmer and have plateau'd on the basic vim features that are good enough, so I'm curious what advanced commands are useful day-to-day.
Nothing really advanced, I think, although maybe one or two obscure things. Here's the problems I found and remember (I wasn't looking for anything, I was just trying some basic stuff). They all might seem trivial, but we're talking muscle memory heI'M.
1. First thing I did was to fold all the functions in the file - this is something vim does pretty badly, actually, because it doesn't know how to deal with Python syntax without lots of customization. But anyway, the command for "fold everything that can be folded, recursively" is zM. Then the command to open everything back up is zR...
Except that for some reason, this vim emulation doesn't open everything, it kept the imports at the top of the file closed.
Verdict: Probably not a big deal, just inconsistent (but maybe PyCharm's way is better?)
2. I then did a standard thing I like to do - if you want to delete a paragraph, you hit 'dip'. Works well. If you have a few lines of whitespace between paragrpahs, and you want to delete everything except one line, the command in vim is 'dvip'. This is actually somewhat obscure but I use this constantly to clean up code. Didn't work.
Verdict: obscure command that's rarely copied correctly, but I use it all the time. Annoying.
3. I then tried to change some text. Let's simplify and say that I did 'ci(' to change the contents of parenthesis. Worked well. However, I tried to undo the change. In vim, this is a single 'u' since the change command is atomic. However here, this required hitting 'u' three times.
Verdict: Ok this is really annoying. It's unpredictable and screws up my muscle memory, plus it's a very very used feature.
4. This might just be my fault - I tried to navigate my Python file using ']]' and '[['. The second one took me to the end of the file, the first did nothing - neither did what I want, which is to jump through various methods/functions. I also tried ']m' and ']d'. This one is not stock vim though (or not exactly), so it might be possible and I just don't know it.
--
I don't remember the other thing.
And btw, I totally don't mean to diss PyCharm, which is awesome in many ways. And I could be only nitpicking here - though again, finding 4/5 problems in 1 minute is not a good sign. But that's my point - emulating vim is, for whatever reason, either really hard, or not something that people spend a lot of effort on. That's why I have to rely on vim itself (or actually Spacemacs nowadays, which amazingly does have an almost completely working vim emulation.)
Agreed that it’s not perfect emulation. I took some time to find alternatives to everything it lacked for me and now I’m satisfied.
The biggest plus is when working with larger projects. The single-threaded autocomplete and jump-to-definition functionality was very slow in Vim, stalling the UI updates. Goland feels so much smoother in these cases.
Response Speed. Most emulations tend to fall behind my actual Vim command speeds, which really destroys the vim editing flow.
Occasionally emulators will not honor mode switches correctly or on the first try. So I would expect to be in insert mode after a complex set of commands but the emulator isn’t there. This is also likely due to speed issues, but maybe not.
Emulators do not do a good job of handling macros, and vim’s repeatability. The auto stuff they try to do (such as formatting, etc) precisely the reasons one would prefer an emulator, can mess up repeatability.
Many of them don’t handle certain basic commands. A lot of emulators, for example, do not handle commands like HML which shift the viewport, possibly because the IDEs do not really give them access to it, or maybe because they aren’t known well enough that they fall way down the priority list.
Everyone does, that's totally legit. However, even without editing anything, just "moving around the file" is much snappier with vim. Even when I'm reading code I'll move to certain parts of a line to better understand what's going on. Plus, you do eventually have to edit code.
If you really never did anything except read code, then I think vim wouldn't give much of an advantage. Then again, neither would any of the shortcuts that every IDE provides.
I use both emacs and Intellij, depending on the circumstances. There are some things for text editing that are just faster in emacs. For example,
- I can be somewhere, jump around to a bunch of files, copy something, and then jump back to whereever I was last actually editing quickly (the "jump back to last edit" is 2 strokes).
- I wrote a custom mode, with tabification and fontification for the query language used by the cms I work with. I expect I could do that in IntelliJ but it would take a lot more effort.
- Things like kill-rectangle and the like; some of which may have parallels in IntelliJ, but I don't know then... and decades of experience in emacs means I do know them (or how to find them) there.
I really like IntelliJ, but I also really like emacs. Which to use depends on what I'm doing.
I also really like _make_ and wrap my other commands (mvn, gradle, etc) in Makefiles. I get jokingly mocked a lot at work :)
So nobody can give the opposing view point? I use both IDEs and Text Editors depending on the language. I use jetbrains for kotlin/java, and moved from vim to vscode for javascript and any other scripting language (also switched from VS to VSCode for .net)
I find developers who try to force their tools on others annoying. I'm much more productive on scripting languages with an editor. They just feel more responsive.
Of course you can disagree with that! I have written great amounts of all sorts of projects in text editors instead of an IDE. And yes, text editors come in different flavours. VS Code/Sublime Text isn’t the same as Notepad. That being said, the person I replied didn’t make a case of VS Code in any way. The OP asked what to use instead of a text editor like Sublime Text, and the reply was simply “Just use VS Code”. That’s not an argument in any way, that’s just a statement.
I have the reverse opinion. I find jetbrain users are so eager to extract the dollar value from their IDE that they try to shoe-horn the use of every available feature into their workflow just because they exist, whereas with vim, the features I use are a laser focused toolset I have accumulated over the years based on the need to solve specific problems. Vim accommodates my desired workflow while many jetbrains users attempt to shift their workflow into webtstorm's feature-set.
That or "VSCode". It does not compare to a proper IDE. And so far my attempts at meaningful discussion regarding it not being the right tool for anything except TS just ends up in "voodoo" arguments about how it can "debug anything", etc.
I'm also a big of of their products, and pay for a persnal subscription for Rider, ReSharper, DotMemory, DotTrace and DotCover. Rider is absolutely stuffed with features, and is way more stable and performant than Visual Studio.
I also like the way your renewal gets cheaper every year, as a kind of loyalty bonus.
I honestly had no idea they were making so much revenue - very pleased to see it though!
Oh, and a special mention is deserved for Rider's git merge UI, which is by far the best I've used.
It's based on 3 window panes: you get your code on the left, theirs on the right, and the result in the middle, along with tools for accepting changes from either side, and you can edit the result pane at will too.
I've never liked the git merge UIs in VS or VS code (or other IDEs I've tried over the years) - Rider's is perfect for me.
The thing is JetBrain's IDEs use that diff tool where-ever a diff is needed, not just for git. For example, in a local history of a file (like undo history), history of a single line in code, etc.
That's just it for me. The tools have so many good features, remain stable, and keep all those features out of my way until I need them. Like Adam Savage's first order accessibility principle for his workshops, the tool I need from their IDEs is always often in arms reach, yet still out of the way.
I also enjoy DotPeek a lot more than the other .NET decompilers out there. I bought Rider, hoping the Visual Studio emulations would satisfy me (I use Visual Studio at work, but run linux at home) but sadly I have been unable to get it to work.
I thought the same when I first saw "stock" Rider - it's a very different look and feel from Visual Studio, more what you'd be used to as a Java dev with IntelliJ, or an Android dev with Android Studio. I personally found th look a bit... dated.
A while back JetBrains made Rider more themable (prior to that update, you could only really theme the editor, not the file explorer etc). After that update, it looks great with a dark theme enabled!
I'm on mobile now, but if I remember later I'll mention the name of the theme I'm using - it's pretty close to VS's dark theme.
That's one of the out-of-the-box themes, but I just checked and the theme I use is called "Visual Studio Code Dark Plus", and I use the colour scheme with the same name. You can find it as a plugin here:
https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/12255-visual-studio-cod...
I always found the Edit and Continue function in Visual Studio to be flakey: often it would say it wasn't "allowed" with the type of project I was using, or it took minutes to apply changes when it did work, or it crashed while applying changes... Rider got Edit and Continue 1-2 years ago (I think), and it's been completely reliable in that time!
This is actually what triggered me to get the personal site license when it first came out a number of years ago.
JetBrains announces that IntelliJ is going Open Source.
I checkout the code, build it (~20ish minutes) inside of the downloaded bits, launch the newly compiled IDE, build the repo source again this time debugging IntelliJ from within itself. All in less than an hour, with no hiccups. Amazing.
I can't figure out how to download the IntelliJ EAP. Everything seems to direct to the standard Commercial/Community IntelliJ download page. Anybody have a link?
OTOH that means you have to upgrade quite frequently (EAP stop working) and the editor is completely broken from time to time.
Also if you take part in a prerelease EAP (before the product is 1.0) (and your feedback is constructive and valuable enough) Jetbrains might gift you a license. That's how I got my first year of PyCharm (well my first year after the EAP ended anyway).
I use Jetbrains products for everything at work. I don't know what's going to happen if I ever have to work at an Eclipse shop. Might have to turn it down, honestly.
I've been the sole Eclipse developer in a number of places where everyone used IntelliJ. At least a couple of the places had switched from Eclipse after having been worn down by that one incessant IntelliJ guy. A few developers discreetly confided that they would rather have stayed on Eclipse, and some new people followed my lead. None of the places were 'IntelliJ shops' though, any more than I know of any 'Eclipse shops'. It would be rather poor form to hard tie your projects to an IDE, so it was always fairly doable to run with your IDE of choice.
There are Eclipse shops? In 2019? Why? I mean, even IntelliJ Community (which, despite the implications of the name, can be used for everything) is a fair bit better.
Speed in large projects. IntelliJ is super slow once you have huge source/text files. E.g. WebStorm is unusable for debugging as one step over takes ~10s on a 128GB RAM machine in such cases.
I am mentioning this in the off chance you did not tried it, exclude the node_modules/vendors/build folders or other third party code that is not part of your project you are editing.
I am not experiencing this issue and I have a large project PHP and JS plus the plugins for jquery and angular , all linting on. After the project loads I don't feel any lag, I run an i5 6th gen CPU , 4cores. I might have tweaked some VM options years back (my configs and styles are at least 5-6 years old so I do not remember).
Also if you transpile all your js into a big minified file, exclude that too, right click on it and there must be an option as mark as plain text.
The last place I was at was an IntelliJ shop, but I don't think there was anything in the project layout or committed files that was specific to IntelliJ, so if they're good about not committing project files, it should be the same for Eclipse. You'd just be on your own, though.
I used PHPStorm for quite some time and was hyped that Android Studio would switch from Eclipse to a JetBrains solution, back in the days. I still don't understand how it could turn out as shitty as it is right now.
I came to say this. That $270M revenue is backed by a #1 product line. I first tried PHPStorm back in 2014 after I got tired of the wonky debugging capability in Eclipse. I still think Eclipse is a really important project in the way that JetBrains is the Google of IDEs and Eclipse is maybe the Firefox, and we need Firefoxes.
I remember there was a time when IBM really invested in it that it was miles better than anything in the Java editing space, or honestly any competitor at the time. For example, instantaneous compiling and error checking was so far ahead it took MS many years to catch up with it.
It used to be a matter of huge excitement when a new language or framework was supported by Eclipse.
But I moved away from Eclipse for a few years (I wasn’t programming then) and I’m back and suddenly it’s absolute terrible. Not just worse than browsers of the time, but possibly worse than what it was when I last used it.
Not sure what you're experiencing but I use Eclipse daily and I can't see anything remotely like what you're describing. It's clunky and sometimes slow (esp. if you run it with default memory - ALWAYS increase the memory). But it works just fine for me.
IBM getting involved in something is usually a death sentence. Initially they might inspire hope. But they'll turn everything into a horrible mess lacking those polishing touches that makes stuff nice to work with. They'll tick feature check-boxes. But the stuff will barely be usable.
You may like them more for a variety of reasons but how is photoshop less free/open than Jetbrains products. Both are commericial products that require a licease and both are on the subscription model after selling unlimited liceases for years.
Mozilla has made a commitment to privacy into its products' main differentiator, and I am 100% okay with that. The fact that FF ships with its Facebook container system turned on by default, and that it just works, is probably my favorite browser feature in quite some time.
I recently went ahead and purchased theyr3 full product line, because I figured there are several I would end up wanting to use and it was just cheaper that way. The reason I bought it though, was specifically for CLion. I figured having a full featured IDE would make it much easier to browse and understand large C or C++ projects, but sadly it seems to only support CMake projects.
This minimal cmake file should setup the ide for any project, the build will have to be ran externally though. You can setup the ide to debug external binaries as well, as long as it has source information (was built from the current project sources with debug info).
I purchased the whole product line as I think Jetbrain's product is excellent, the only complain from me is this CLion Cmake requirement, could be more versatile, and supports non-Cmake projects(or even single files without makefiles), even Geany does better than CLion as far as c/c++ is concerned. Please make CLion better for C/C++
I have used CLion, and would say JetBrains did an excellent job with making a C IDE. The issue is that C is not much of an "IDE language"; my experience has always been to just use a text editor (vim or vscode), and it seems to be the same for most C devs I know. Looking at newer languages, they seem to pair closely with IDEs; I'm still not a big IDE guy, but most use them for python, java, etc. I'm not enough of an expert to quantify the reasons behind this, but I think it's hard to build a stand-out good IDE for a language with which IDEs often aren't used or are just used as glorified text editors.
> The issue is that C is not much of an "IDE language"
This isn't an issue with the language so much as it is with the build systems, includes, library paths, and tooling.
Compare to Java (set the classpath to exactly the artifacts you want and IntelliJ uses its own build system unless you explicitly tell it otherwise), Python (set up a virtualenv with exactly what you want and PyCharm handles its own builds, insofar as Python builds).
In C on Windows and Unix you have to figure out how to find and address includes and libraries in a cross platform way. CMake is probably the best bet. If they were in the position of, say, TurboC back in DOS days where they provided stdlib and you added everything else you wanted, they could do as good a job as for Java.
> This isn't an issue with the language so much as it is with the build systems, includes, library paths, and tooling.
Exactly. #include "header.h". But where is it? Depends on compiler flags. Java has the same problem, but luckily has only ~2 build systems that are well-supported by IDEs.
Java doesn't really have the same problem. It has the classpath, and that's it, across all platforms. Nor do the big IDEs use ant, maven, or gradle as their internal build system, though most of them support controlling them.
Yeah, there was some improvement. But the issue for me is building a C++ app which requires Linux headers, Boost headers, and Wt, CLion seems to wants to take four cpu's for a hot trip. Even with a bunch of the code helpers turned off.
VSCode with CMake, clangd, and C++ code filter seems to work for the little I've used it so far.
Havn't quite taken the leap of faith in VIM, clangd to see if that is suitable.
One thing I've found with CLion is that you really, really want to edit the JVM settings for the IDE. By default it starts with a 2GB memory limit for the JVM, which even for small projects will severely drag down performance, e.g. my MBP would run very hot, spin the fans and the IDE would get very laggy. Increasing the JVM settings to allocate 8GB completely solved this.
It's not the editor part that uses all this RAM I suppose, but the code parser and indexer that by default includes scanning & interpreting all your dependencies (system headers, boost, other third-party frameworks). There is a clang process that has the full AST for all of your code + its dependencies in the background all the time, so you can get search, index, autocomplete, syntax check, refactor etc. that actually works compared to the half-baked solutions you get with VIM plugins (and I've tried all of them).
I guess you can switch all of that off of course, but that's what makes it an IDE and not an editor. I think the memory tradeoff is perfectly fine for this kind of application.
At the moment I am sitting here adding couple of things to a huge desktop application written in Delphi. More then a million lines for a full build (which takes 11 seconds on laptop btw). It does all that you mention with all bells and whistles of a modern IDE and consuming whopping 380MB. How's that for a change?
Apples and oranges, Delphi != C++, and on top of that I don't think you really want to make the argument that the Delphi IDE can do all the things CLion can do for C++. I fondly remember my time writing Delphi, but I'm not jaded enough about the resource requirements of modern IDE's to pretend that you can compare these environments equally.
Anyway, I don't really see the point you trying to argue here. It appears you are principally opposed to software that uses more resources than what you consider necessary, which is fine and in the case of something like CLion or VS code justified to some extent, because they are far from lightweight. But if you remove these ideological objections from the discussion, none of this actually matters all that much considering typical workstation hardware. I honestly don't mind trading 4 or 8 of the 16 GB of RAM in my laptop for all the features I get from CLion compared to the alternatives. A full compile and run of the thing I'm building can easily get by with (much) less than 2 GB. And if I would be developing something that uses up 8+ GB by itself, I probably want a beefier workstation with 32 GB or more anyway. It's just not an issue, RAM is plentiful, and it's in there to be used.
All my laptops have 32GB of RAM. And if I had no other options I probably could've been stuck with CLion. However as I've already mention CodeLite and QtCreator are multiplatform, very responsive, work just fine as an IDE and eat very little memory comparatively to CLion. I often have to test big in memory datasets so I have way better ways of wasting RAM.
No it is not fine. The only impression I get from glorified notepads consuming gigabytes of RAM is the ever increasing desire to send them to /dev/null where they belong. My opinion of course
There is absolutely no excuse for any editing product to be perceptibly slow.
A single ordinary, commodity CPU core can sort 100M of totally random ints in 5 seconds. The amount of work any editor legitimately needs to do to provide you editing support is trivial, in comparison, by any measure.
Every time I see these guys pop up, I'm reminded of the time a decade ago where they literally copied my .NET profiler (nprof) into their "brand new" .NET profiling product at the time and just shipped it.
No apologies, no compensation for building a commercial product on something I had spent a decent amount of time on. Very disappointing of them.
At the time, we had a student working on the project and they used a couple of classes from NProf code for loading the profiler under IIS. This was done incorrectly as it was not in compliance with the GPL license. This was brought to our attention on March 18th 2005, and after careful examination we responded on March 21st 2005, following up by removing said code and rewriting it. We indicated this resolution to you and you were satisfied and showed support for JetBrains. We do have reference to the aforementioned interchange between yourself and JetBrains. Should you require a copy, please let us know.
We'd like to apologise for this mishap which was a complete oversight, and was remedied as soon as it was brought to our attention.
Feel free to reach me out if you have any further questions
Thanks for the (second) apology. It looks like some details got fuzzy over 15 years.
Apologies on my end for mis-remembering that I already received an apology from the VP of product development at the time.
That would be great - I no longer have the email in question as I lost access to that account and virtually all email records from the early 2000s (mmastrac@canada.com, I'm assuming). If you could forward that to matthew@mastracci.com I can have that for my records so I don't forget the details again.
> No apologies, no compensation for building a commercial product on something I had spent a decent amount of time on.
I think the important question here is did they do this in violation of the open source license you had adopted as at the time the alleged infraction took place?
Something can be legal and still be incredibly tasteless. If you keep lifting major open source tooling as the basis of your product without contributing, you're eventually going to exhaust the patience and free time of the people working on it.
Think about it this way: When Linus started working on Linux and decided to release it under the GPL, was it because he wanted companies to use it as the basis of billion-dollar revenues without sponsoring development or compensating him for his work? Lots of people start contributing to open source at a smaller scale, where it's just individuals and small businesses and non-profit orgs sharing with each other, but it becomes kind of a different matter when a company has dozens or hundreds of millions to throw around and doesn't share back. At least in the case of Linux it is well-funded now but there are other cases where core infra has still suffered - you can find recent stories about how the maintainer of NTP struggled to pay rent even though massive companies rely on it.
If you think doing so is tasteless, you are clearly approaching this with a social lens and I don’t necessarily disagree with your conclusions.
I chose to approach this with an economic lens, hence the question of whether the original license was permissive, which is the green-light that allows all commercial exploitations to not appear illegal in the eyes of the law.
Open source is one of those activities where developers, who are no less human than non-developers, interleave social norms with market norms.
As far as humans go, social & market/economic norms don’t mix very well [0], so an unfortunate side effect of a lot of open source projects is that our expectations as humans get routinely violated due to the unnatural mix, as your example of the open source NTP developer in near penury clearly illustrates.
I think a fundamental root of this problem is that many foundational parts of the open source/free software model are social and not economic in nature. People are encouraged to view this as a commons, where everyone is helping each other and lifting each other up. In practice, if you put something on github, you're funding some tech company's products, you just don't know it yet.
In my case I built and maintained my software for 3 years and when I chose my license I knew the license meant that someone could repackage it and sell it. That was a decision I made, and maybe my decision was wrong, but in the end the economic factors meant I could no longer pay rent by doing it anymore, so I stopped. Those actors lost the foundation of their product as a result, so the economic factors didn't end up working out in their favor either.
I could perhaps have prevented their actions by using the GPL, but it wouldn't have suddenly made them pay me - they would have just lifted someone else's inferior permissively-licensed solution, because there were multiple options and mine was just the best. I did previously have corporate sponsorship, but that never lasts forever.
GPL is GPL. If their thing isn't, they are in violation. They now have deep pockets.
For anything that had no license spelled out, they had and have no license to use it at all.
To be clear: they appear to have no license to distribute your code today, and owe you damages for all the distribution they have done thus far that was not licensed.
To add, if they are still selling it today then it may reset any statue of limitations. I would recommend that you talk to a lawyer, and get them to draft Jetbrains a letter.
There is no statute of limitations for copyright violation, to my knowledge. I gather Germany imposes some pretty draconian time limits for initiating enforcement, but have not heard of others.
As others have pointed out, if they weren't distributing source and passing on the license, this is a blatant copyright violation, and what they were (still are?) doing is illegal.
If you're at all interested in doing anything about it, copyleft.org has a bunch of useful resources.
It turned out that they specified GPL, and so the redistributor is violating the license.
However, if they hadn't specified a license, then the product would be unlicensed. Which would make the redistributor directly violating their copyright.
If source code doesn't come with a license, that doesn't make it fair game. That makes it unusable by any third-parties.
If they've done it to you, it's very possible they've done/do it to others. You should post your story. JetBrains is not a little operation and should to be held to account if they've done what you've said.
Pretty standard in the .NET ecosystem, unfortunately. I had a similar experience with multiple tools vendors repackaging my stuff for free as the foundation of their product. The only time I ever got a sponsorship offer or even bug fix contributions was a while after I had stopped doing their work for them for free.
Yeah. That soured me on the .NET ecosystem a lot. I was a fan of VS.NET/Resharper at the time (pretty groundbreaking). I moved on to Java/Linux over the next couple years.
- The best IDEs by far. There is nothing remotely close. I have been a dedicated Emacs user for over 30 years. But there is so much Intellij does that just isn't available in Emacs, that I started moving more of my dev work to IDE, maybe 10 years ago. I still escape to Emacs sometimes (from the IDE), but if I'm coding in Java, Python, or sometimes C/C++, JetBrains tools are my main environment.
- The products keep getting better with every release.
- Excellent support. They are always fast and address my exact problem.
- Reasonable licensing.
- The free versions of their products are usable. I got by on free versions for years.
I am thankful that they remain independent. I fear than an acquisition would dilute their focus and kill their many-years long streak of stellar accomplishment.
I can't consider myself to be an emacs superuser but I've built muscle memory around its key bindings so on JetBrains IDEs, I use my custom emacs based key maps. I used to be an Eclipse user many years ago, but when IntelliJ community came out, and it started supporting emacs key maps, I made the jump. I'm now using ultimate licensed by the shop I work at.
I'm absolutely pleased with these numbers. This gives confidence that JetBrains has products that are used by a market of paying customers who are developers from companies big and small. Not even raising capital is impressive since these days, we have news of startups / companies with zero profit raising cash every 6 months and on each funding round, they forfeit control of their companies.
With these numbers, this confirms that 'developers' are the new customers.
I think it's a generally frugal market even if some of us are flush with a bit of cash. There's a lot you can get done for free with various FOSS stacks, and outside of highly specialized tools that aren't easy to replicate in features/availability/guarantees, I think it's a hard market to get a foot in, because the power of NIH is so strong. Things like IDEs, or security services, that take either a very slow burn or a lot of programming/design power are possibly the exception, and even then you can spoil it. A lot of people on here got upset when JetBrains moved from permanent licenses to a subscription service -- but in hindsight, I think it was the right move and it probably paid off! Think about that: you have a tool that is used in-and-out, like bread and butter, every day, like 30 hours a week -- and maybe, if you're lucky, a developer who makes 6 figures will say "ok I'll pay $200 a year i guess" or whatever. It's kind of incredible! Of course corporate accounts do not bat an eye at this; in fact they like continuous support, renewals, and services. It keeps things regular.
It's very easy to look at JetBrains and say it can obviously work, just the same way people look at RedHat (or other outliers) and say it can work. They're a standout company in this space, and have high reputation, and it didn't come from nowhere. They almost make it look easy -- just sell a great product, boom! But it depends on a lot of factors like when they entered the market, how they grew over time, etc. It's possible they wouldn't be able to get off the ground today if they tried this whole thing again.
In fact I wouldn't be surprised if JetBrains existence, happening before the whole VC craze, has in fact influenced the market itself, today: even with millions of dollars of VC funny money, it would probably be very difficult to compete with them on their turf in 2019, when they have extremely high reputation and a big array of products, in a market that is a very "small world". They're the 900lb gorilla in the room, in a sense, but they did it on their own.
JetBrains products are amazing though, without a doubt, and they deserve their success. I wish them all the best.
> It's possible they wouldn't be able to get off the ground today if they tried this whole thing again.
I think that's unkind. The product they had when they started (IDEA) was so much better than the competition, that it felt like magic. Yes, they rode the Java wave, but there have been other waves since then (Ruby, Python...) and nobody really managed to replicate for those markets the same experience of productivity jump that JetBrains managed back then.
Meanwhile, JetBrains have done it again with PyCharm, which is the Python IDE and has been consistently ahead of the competition literally from day 1. They entered a market where others had been for more than a decade, and ran away with it. That's just skill, not timing. By the time Python exploded in popularity, they were the obvious choice already. The fact that they can even field competitive products in the Microsoft space, where the gold-standard of IDEs has existed for 25+ years, is testament to their talent.
They've also legitimized a subscription-based approach to software-development tools, which will make it much easier for anyone to compete with them. A "new JetBrains" would find it much easier to develop an IDE today and get paid for it, which wasn't the case 20 years ago. The problem is really that very few people seem to think they can deliver a jump in developer productivity of the sort we've seen with IDEA back then.
PyCharm’s success also has to do with the fact that they already had IntelliJ — both in terms of marketing and in terms of having lots of tech already in place.
I love IntelliJ but I am constantly switching between PyCharm and WebStorm, which is quite annoying since I end up doing python and javascript in both. I wish they one modular product instead of many, many slightly different products.
Edit: I'm learning in the comments below that IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate gives you the capabilities of the other products all together. This sounds great! I'm going to try it.
PyCharm includes all of the features of WebStorm because it's so common for Python developers to also do JS work, so you probably should just be using PyCharm. That's what I do at my work. (It's also why PyCharm is more expensive than WebStorm.)
If you find that WebStorm works better, you probably need to install the node.js plugin in PyCharm (which is free). It's included by default in WebStorm but not in PyCharm.
If you use their flagship offering, IntelliJ, it includes language support for Python, Javascript, and many other languages either directly or via a plugin that replaces most of the respective functionality of Webstorm, Pycharm and Rubymine. Just some niche features (like a C debugger only found in CLion) are unique to the other IDEs IIRC
I write F# and Scala (among other various languages). Unfortunately I have to own Rider and Intellij to do all of those things in the JetBrains ecosystem :\
I too have run into this recently at work. IntelliJ for Rust, Dart, JS/TS, PHP etc but I break out Rider for C#. Would be a dream if one day these were combined so IntelliJ would be a true polygot IDE
Not entirely sure what you mean by "multi-module", but I can do all sorts of stuff with PyCharm.
Multiple "sources-roots", multiple-projects in the same workspace. Also, you can install pip install external libs in source development mode and debug them, etc. Short of "project imports" that I miss from Eclipse, I'm not sure what you may be referring to.
Like multi-language projects where you're working with both Java and Python code in the same source tree (actually you can include arbitrary folders from anywhere), or using multiple Python versions (and virtualenvs) in for different modules/packages in the same project.
> I love IntelliJ but I am constantly switching between PyCharm and WebStorm, which is quite annoying since I end up doing python and javascript in both. I wish they one modular product instead of many, many slightly different products.
That's IntelliJ IDEA.
Though it seems completely unnecessary, PyCharm (non-CE) should contain all the features of WebStorm (sometimes with a bit of lag).
IDEA has its annoyances though. E.g. you get a Go plugin that delivers almost everything that GoLand has, but you still have menu items here and there complaining that your project lacks a Java SDK...
I wish they had a way of building an IDE in a completely modular way. Then again, maybe it would end up as bad as Eclipse...
Are PyCharm and WebStorm different from the other JetBrains products? Usually the products are nothing more than a collection of IntelliJ Ultimate plugins that are packaged up and sold separately. In other words, what you want to buy is Ultimate.
> Usually the products are nothing more than a collection of IntelliJ Ultimate plugins
That's not really true. The experience you get from, e.g. PyCharm and GoLand is substantially better than what you get from IDEA + Python plugin or IDEA + Go plugin. Yes, the plugin will get you 85% of the way there, but it will feel more clumsy and hacky than just using the dedicated product.
That’s absolutely wrong. The only thing that you’ll notice in IDEA is that it makes certain assumptions about Java (e.g vocabulary and certain menu items are Java-related), but otherwise the functionality is the same.
The language specific apps also seem to get updated before the language plugins do.
I used to use IntelliJ Ultimate, and had to wait a while before getting new features announced for PhpStorm, for example.
I now just use PhpStorm for PHP and GoLand for Go, instead of attempting to use IntelliJ for all languages. I spend less time configuring IntelliJ for each language and get updates on release day.
JetBrains has an "everything" licence that I was able to migrate to from IntelliJ Ultimate.
Python support inside IDEA is not the same as Pycharm, please don't confuse people. If you want to do Python development, use PyCharm. For Java, use IDEA.
I have used IDEA for 4 years doing Python development. Now I am using PyCharm, where the only difference is that it doesn’t support multi-module projects.
Please specify the differences as I am seeing none.
>Edit: I'm learning in the comments below that IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate gives you the capabilities of the other products all together. This sounds great! I'm going to try it.
Pycharm professional should have all the features of webstorm in it. The thing with IDEA is that the ecosystem is too huge and it assumes JVM centered development.
I badly want to use intellij for Rust and other languages. But the issue I smash up against is that years of Vscode + my customizations has made using any other editor terribly clunky.
I can spend hours customizing the controls and UI but I still feel like someone handed me the keys to some old car made in a country that doesn't exist anymore.
This in part revealed to me the cost associated with all the editor customizations I make. Default settings are nice that way.
are you really writing that much code where a 20% (actual, and I'm going to guess to you it's a 100% percieved) slow down is going to make you get fired?
Or think of it another way, why are you only able to work in optimal environments, and is that the real benefit you provide? Are you going to get laid off if you aren't fully optimal? If you switched keyboard layouts would you lose this speed too? Can you afford to make ANY changes at all if this is your criteria?
After having to code about 80 java file application on a data center pull out crappy laptop screen with a jacket with just notepad and javac over a few days I just use the defaults on everything or settings that are one change away (like eclipse mode in intellij which is a meta setting like vim mode). Other than that I just adapt and never customize. This lets me use other people's computers easily, use many different OSes (I write software that enables the rest of my company so I write for what they use on what they use), and editors with little issue. I can also setup a computer in about 20 minutes. I find that the majority of my time these days is deciding what we should be doing and how. The time to write the actual code is pretty minimal.
So I ask again are you optimizing for the right thing here? Unless you are constantly re-enacting the scene from Swordfish I don't think you are.
Former Emacs user here. I've been doing the same: stick with the defaults as much as possible and adapt. This brought nice additions to my workflow, like multi-cursor editing, which I didn't use in Emacs because doing regexes was my way of solving these problems.
PS: I'm pretty sure that Emacs must have a multi-cursor mode somewhere :)
You've found joy in the narrative of "I just adapt and never customize ... [I can function well in my org] with little issue". Someone with a different set of constraints and preferences won't find that narrative as enjoyable.
Apologies but I'm only reading the first sentence of your comment.
It's about how I enjoy coding. Its my job but I love it. It's fun. Part of what makes it so enjoyable is the ergonomics. Ask any craftsman about their tools.
Non-sarcastic question, how do you fare in situations where you are uncomfortable, like learning new skills; Where you are just BAD at a thing. New sport, new technology/language, etc?
I learned a while back that I had to lean into those things and just get through the awkward if you wanted to keep learning.
You raise a great point the more I think about it.
I thrive when learning new skills and being "uncomfortable" and out of my element.
It's probably because I'm picking at rust for fun in my personal time that I don't want to deal with the uncomfortable parts. In my own time I coast and comfortably stroll through new problem spaces rather than get to that "my brain hurts" part that's all too familiar.
If rust + intellij was a work requirement I probably would just pick it up and discover that my brain can handle perfectly, two sets of bindings the way people claim to be able to do qwerty and Dvorak interchangeably.
Personally I pick one new thing per personal project and leverage my skills on the rest. If I go too far into the new things then I get bored or flummoxed with say "buck build system" and "learn kotlin" in the same project, and never actually make progress.
I think this is why I bounced off of react 4 times before sticking, too many things to learn at once. Then again I bounced off of antlr 4 times and only really got it to stick because it was a work need, and antlr is the only new tool in that chain.
There's no need to be that aggressive, OP didn't say anything about getting fired or losing his job. What's optimal is subjective, and they seem to find comfort in what they do. Let's not get too used to tooting our own horn that we do it even on unrelated comment chains.
Oh boy. This is how I feel any time I touch a coworker's computer to try and peer program or help them out. I have so many shortcuts (Keyboard Maestro), workflows (Alfred 3), keybinding changes (Karabiner), and utility programs (Amethyst, Spectacle) on top of this IDE thing (I use intelliJ and coworkers use VSCode) that I immediately press a bunch of keys (out of muscle memory) and invariably something completely unexpected happens. It's super frustrating - but I doubt anything can be done about it other than sticking to my machine.
If you pair program a lot you could export your Intellij settings and switch to that profile when you're on their machine. But it sounds like that only handles some of the changes that you'd need (you could move any of your Intellij related key bindings from Karabiner into Intellij to get a little closer).
Not sure IntelliJ can handle key mapping the same way as Karabiner - for example, my right option key (only the right one, not the left) is mapped to command + space. Good tip nevertheless!
Ya, fair enough... I too have some Karabiner mappings that can't be done in IntelliJ. If you're serious about it, another option could be to get a programmable keyboard so many of the keybindings are right in the keyboard and you could just plug your keyboard in to the other person's computer.
i’m like 60% sure that this is why nixOS was born at all: some very dedicated emacs or vim user got so fed up with moving configs around that they built an entire package manager/distro/thing to solve their config issue for all time.
Except that Nix doesn't manage your home directory! (though some folks have put together some less-than-prime-time solutions).
That's actually something that's a major hole for me; it would be like twice as useful if it did. But yeah, my solution is just: https://github.com/zenhack/vim-config
Can anyone comment on the state of Vim emulation in Vscode? I'm in Android Studio largely because of its support for my .vimrc, without which I can not live. But I see[1] that there have been recent commits related to this in Vscode. How good is it? Other thoughtful comparisons between life in JetBrains world vs Vscode welcome as well.
Update: Curious, I took Vscode for a spin again and installed the latest Vim plugin. Although .vimrc keybinding support is supposed to be there, I'm getting no love. So new ticket for the maintainers [1]. The thing is Vscode is SO snappy and slick, I'm going to switch anyway :)
over the years, i've learnt that learning to work with vanilla vim commands is the best way to go. any editing plugin feature is just an extra command character or two away if you know the basics very well. this means i am instantly productive in any ide that has a vim plugin.
in fact i'd extend that to bash as well. i only use very minimal configuration these days.
Vim support is still pretty meh, though better than some others. The onivim guys are still plugging away at libvim [0], and I'm really hoping once it's stable, someone integrates it with vscode and other editors.
I have a pretty extensive .vimrc, and use VSCode as my primary editor. Since VSCode didn't have .vimrc support when I set it up, I ended up translating my .vimrc into VSCodeVim's settings.json. It took a bit to figure out how, but now I prefer using vim in VSCode to using it in the terminal.
I use both and have contributed to the IntelliJ extension. I haven’t noticed any functional difference between the two extensions and they both fit all my use cases.
I've been using vim for roughly half my life at this point. What I've found is that actually using the editor is so thoroughly muscle memory at this point that using another editor, where I actually have to consciously think about how to do something, is incredibly distracting.
It's not like the difference in input speed is really meaningful; as you'll see someone point out in any discussion about this stuff, the bottleneck in programming is thinking.
But what I find will often happen is:
1. I settle on a course of action.
2. I go to actually do it.
3. The editor doesn't do what I expect, because it's not vim.
4. I am momentarily confused, and have to think for a minute about how to do what I want.
5. I lose my train of thought entirely.
6. Rinse, repeat.
So for me it's not so much about any specific thing the editor does to make me productive. I do have opinions about some things, but what's important is that it just fades into the background and lets me think about the problem I'm trying to solve.
Beyond just being "different," I tend to eschew IDEs for much the same reason -- while many of the advanced features seem useful, I find them too distracting to be worth the trouble. Just me and the code, please.
I worked at an automotive shop for a while. Let's go with an impact wrench for an example.
In the car shop world, impact wrenches are primarily used for the installation and removal of wheels on vehicles.
The impact wrench I started with had a single internal hammer- the thing that makes a click noise and applies torque. After a while of using it, I could hear when the wheel was seated correctly, and when it wasn't.
Later, that tool broke, and got replaced with a dual-hammer one- and all of a sudden, I couldn't hear-- feel-- when wheels were on right, and it took me a few vehicles to adjust to the new noise, weight, and feel of the tool. I got used to the new one eventually, but I still liked the noises that the original wrench made more.
Before I adjusted, I was unable to perform that part my job correctly because I didn't know exactly how to use the new thing that was identical in use-case to the old one.
My CAD program of choice doesn't have many keybinds stock- and so I've bound my own shortcuts to different things buried under various menus. I also have a Logitech G502, which has buttons on the sides of it, that I've also bound to some of the more-used, harder-to-get-to functions. It's much easier to open up the parameters table- which I use heavily to tweak designs I make. It's the way I like to do things, and that one bind on the side of my mouse saves me from rooting through menus all the time trying to find the same thing over and over again. I set up that bind almost two years ago, and I've been using it ever since.
When I got a new laptop recently, I had a hard time doing CAD until after I ported over all my keybinds and stuff.
Now to answer your question- because those of us who use powerful tools to build custom stuff also like to customize the tools we have for the task at hand. A developer who's used to their setup that they live with every day will undoubtedly have a hard time using the factory settings, and an even harder time working with someone else's bindings.
Why do people become so dependent on tools? Because we mold them to suit our desires, and they become an extension of who we are, and what we can do.
Forgive me but aren't they just identical apps? I swear I thought they were all the same base program with a different set of plug-ins. And you could basically make any of them behave like any of them.
Indeed! Love the spirit, work your way bottom-up as you encounter problems, remain practical yet keep that 10,000 ft view. All compounded by splendid execution, to the point that you are elevated 'upstream' so to speak by the master[1].
(There might also incentive for Google to move away from anything even remotely touched by Oracle; case in point being Java, despite the open sdk for that).
If you're wondering, the "6M users / 405k customers" comes from the Community editions of PyCharm and IntellJ (maybe also Android Studio) and their free-for-students offer[0] ( which I would imagine is a big part of getting companies who hire college grads to license JB products).
> I would imagine is a big part of getting companies who hire college grads to license JB products
It's a good idea because, at least in our company, all of the young kids who are fresh out of school use VS Code while most of the seasoned people use IntelliJ (obviously there is one senior person using VIM as required by developer stereotypes).
> which I would imagine is a big part of getting companies who hire college grads to license JB products
I would assume so as well. It sounds negative though, but I'm quite okay with this particular one.
I think this is different from student offerings where there is some sort of lock-in. Microsoft makes sure every student can try Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft Office and get used to how it works, but with an editor from a company that just makes editors and doesn't want to tie you into their ecosystem, I think it's fine.
They are a sponsor of PyCon and their booth is always a hub of activity. Last year they held mini tutorial sessions with prominent Python developers who demonstrated PyCharm with various programming examples (like Flask, virtual environments and Jupyter notebooks).
I was able to talk directly with the PyCharm developers to figure out a problem I was having when starting new projects. Their developers are friendly and very knowledgeable.
I have no hesitation renewing my PyCharm subscription knowing that these guys are building a great product that makes my work easier.
Happy to see them succeed as a successful bootstrapped company who are operating on a sustainable business model that allows them to continue iterating and improving their already best-of-class products better with each release.
Jet Brains offers the best value for any commercial (i.e. non-free) dev products I've ever used. Currently an active user of Rider, ReSharper, dotPeek, dotTrace, dotMemory, IntelliJ, Android Studio, DataGrip, WebStorm and TeamCity [1] - all world class tools available at a comically cheap price with their "All Products Pack" - even cheaper with their loyalty discount.
I'm normally not fond of subscription-based products but as their product suite offers so much value I count myself as a happy multi-year subscriber that in all likelihood will remain one until I retire from programming.
[1] TeamCity has separate licensing, used to pay for but now comfortably fit within their generous (100 projects / 3 build agents) free-tier limits
I think that is a harmful generalization and feeds on itself (more distrust creates more security measures which creates more the feeling that you need to secure yourself against this threat).
They are very open about it and I don't see any problem with it. You could find some issues with them running a cloud software like that, but given that they primarily produce tools that are largely open source it is not a problem in my mind.
Here is an article about their operations in Prague (in czech), from what I understand they have most of developers in St petesburgh..
The guidelines also say: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
In this case, assuming good faith would be assuming that @ordx is stating a fact that they're aware of, not trying to stir up controversy. If you were interested in finding out how they knew that, you could politely ask them what their source of information was, without implying that they have ulterior motives.
282 comments and I'll be the first person to mention AppCode.
This makes me wonder whether AppCode is really a niche product for JetBrains compared to their other wildly successful IDEs.
AppCode used to be hands down best IDE for iOS development in times of Objective-C, but after introduction of Swift, it's downhill in terms of quality. One of projects I'm working on doesn't even compile (multiple frameworks and app in monolith codebase). 2019.3 was supposed to improve symbol caching, building module maps and code assistance and it makes little difference for me - I'm still getting freezes for multiple seconds and code completion occasionally becomes available with such delay that I'm done typing what could have been autocompleted for me.
In 2 months my subscription expires and I'm really sad to give up on this product.
Sorry for venting dear HN community, but it's not all roses in JetBrains land.
I used Eclipse at a Java shop for about a year, and then they bought me an IntelliJ license.
It was night and day. IntelliJ was a dream. And not just because of features; it was smoother and it had an Apple level of cohesive, thoughtful user design.
I remember when I was able to make the switch from Eclipse to the first beta of Android Studio.
This was night and day as well !
Sadly, I feel that the experience has degraded a LOT since then.
IntelliJ did not technically get worse, the typical Android build just grew in complexity way faster than IntelliJ optimizations could follow.
Same thing with Gradle actually. It has been getting significantly faster. But if during the 6 months you spent in order to speed up gradle by 30 % the typical build complexity has increased by 50%; sadly it means that you are losing.
Their company philosophy is "everybody codes", which results in much less management (and possibly more freedom for the employee :).
They have an office in Munich.
Only vacation. I think 20 is the legal minimum on full work day vacations that the company must give if you work 5 days a week. On top of that there are 14 national holidays. Normally companies in Germany give their employees 28 to 30 days, so 25 isn't that great.
Sick leave does not count towards any of those, if you're sick then you don't go to work and you still get paid - as simple as that. If you get sick while on vacation those days then count as sick leave and not vacation.
Probably it's just vacation, holidays are separate and sick time is its own whole thing. I work for Google in Munich and the vacation time is 30 days as they say, and then a bunch of holidays (actually about the same as Google in the US due to weekend handling) and of course sick time is available.
I am a big fan of Intellij. But the single most feature I hate about their products is keyboard shortcuts. If they follow standard unix shortcuts along with standard browser shortcuts, it will be more productive.
I'm with you that the defaults aren't my favorite... but as a heavy Sublime user I was able to migrate the bindings over that made sense to me... Intellij products are insanely configurable.
Also - I would either use their cloud sync and/or VCS to back-up your customizations. It sucks switching to a new computer and losing a day re-configuring your IDE back to baseline =|
Is it easy to use VCS for that? Last time I checked it wasn't [1]. In fact, that is maybe the main thing keeping me from learning IntelliJ tools more: I'm not comfortable with programs that I know I will want to customize but can't just git add the customizations to the dotfiles repo.
I've done it in the past but I'll admit it's been years since I've used it. The cloud sync thing works just fine for me and fits well with the subscription model etc.
Looks like they may have gone off the deep-end with the configuration files - I remember the ability to export to a MUCH smaller file but this was probably 4 years ago at this point.
Going to go out on a limb here and say that I think the IntelliJ keyboard shortcuts make more sense than any other IDE I've used.
Control+Alt+L for code lint & format makes a heck of a lot more sense than the two separate Control+K Control+J or whatever that Visual Studio demands. Same for optimize imports - Control+Alt+O(ptimize) instead of Control+K Control+I or whatever in VS.
I haven't used Eclipse in ages, but I remember those shortcuts being bad enough that I never bothered to learn them.
Switch to file by name? IntelliJ: Control+E + type name + enter. VS: Control+semicolon (??) + type name + enter (if you're lucky, or you might have to go double click it in the project pane).
Of course, this is all a matter of preference, and the bindings can be changed. Although if you prefer the "chorded" shortcuts of VS, I don't know if IntelliJ supports that :)
Give it two weeks. I agree the debugging F-keys are a bit strange, but a great thing is that you can do everything without touching the mouse once you know the keys. And for any shortcut you don't know, just use the Actions search.
I really like IntelliJ and recommend everyone try them even if my favorites are NetBeans, Eclipse and VS Code.
This seems to be just some weird preference that my brain has and since Jetbrains is such a nice company and has a sustainable funding model I'm happy to send people their way
I'd been a Visual Studio user for I think over a decade, and was really, really sick of listening to my laptop fans whining the whole time, and frequent freeze-ups. Every new version promised better performance, and never delivered - VS's poor (and unreliable) performance is the main thing that made me try Rider, and what performance revelation it was!
I've used VS with ReSharper for many years, because ReSharper adds so much to it
That said, before I pulled the trigger and purchased a Rider license, I tried running VS without ReSharper. While it certainly was definitely faster, more responsive and used less memory, I still didn't find it as snappy as Rider. It also still had my laptop fans whining, and occasionaly became completely unresponsive.
It's a real shame - Visual Studio is without doubt an excellent IDE, but performance and reliability issues have plagued it since forever. I really wish a serious effort would be made to address these.
FWIW I find IDEA more responsive (fewer random lags while typing) than my pretty minimal emacs setup. Text editors like vim, kakoune, or xi are snappy, are not IDEs.
I suppose I meant snappy and responsive relative to Eclipse. Early 2000's java development was dominated by eclipse and netbeans. I used Eclipse in college and the difference between Eclips & Intellij was night and day.
They’ve gotten a lot better recently. If you haven’t tried in a while may be time to revisit. Particularly if you’re on MacOS, where they used to have serious issues.
Nice, Intellij (avec GoPlugin) is the only dev tool I pay for out of pocket.
The vast majority of the company I'm at uses VSCode (for mostly GoLang & Typescript). So I don't want to make the case to have them pay for it. But 40hrs/w of my existance is spent in a IDE/editor and IMO its totally worth it to pay for the one I feel most productive with.
I have a tiny Go program that I very rarely touch and was quite happy with the go plugin ... until they launched their full blown Go IDE and disabled the plugin in their other IDEs.
Wut? The plugin is there. I installed it in IDEA without any problems just two weeks ago. Then again, I have an Ultimate subscription, I don't know if the free versions are held back.
Hmm, I can appreciate that free EAP download links would probably be a tad nontrivial to find by design, but after having a bit of a dig I'm still coming up stumped.
Haven't used their IDEs for some time, but I really like DataGrip. While someone always knows of an open source alternative, it's the best full-featured cross-database tool I've found.
I really liked HeidiSQL when I was working on Windows, but after switching to Linux I struggled to find anything with similar UI and workflow. DataGrip was a really nice discovery, though I still haven't gotten fully comfortable with the UI, it's quite a bit more complex.
I'm one of those recent converts. I picked up programming in my late 30's and the first tool I ended up paying for was Pycharm. I never went through the 'print statement' phase as their debugger is incredible.
How great is the 32 GB of ram? I have a 2017 macbook pro. I don't ever develop on a desktop machine to be able to know what I'm missing out on by only having 16 GB.
I run on 16GB at work and 8 at home. At home I run into issues with large Factorio factories or if I have too many browser tabs open (tbh that's an issue with me, not with my system, but more RAM would be a workaround for it), but at work the amount feels quite luxurious. I never got close to running out even with multiple VMs running at the same time, so I don't really see the need for more than 16. Maybe specialized applications need it like machine learning or so? Though that would seem like something you'd do on a server instead of your local laptop.
Unless you're running close to full most of the time, I also don't think the extra disk caching more RAM allows for is generally worth it. I have a few GB free most of the time (both at home and at work) and that seems to suffice to cache whatever files I'm currently working with.
If you keep tabs open for days and don't open them, like me, you might want to try a tab suspending extension. There's noticable lag when I open a tab I haven't opened in hours, but my FF on Ubuntu is fine with ~100 open tabs.
The new breed of garbage collectors may change this significantly for the better. They need to be explicitly enabled, but there is a GC (G1) that may be better suited for desktop applications (low latency pauses, relinquishes memory to the OS more frequently while idle, etc.) available in Java 11.
Thank Garbage Collected languages. I just checked the IDEA config and found its maximum heap is set to 750 MB by default. You typically wouldn't need 32GB to run it.
I changed the maximum heap for my IntelliJ IDEA instances to 2GB and haven't seen a slowdown since. 750M is too low if you're working on a large project imo. Adding a dependency to my pom and immediately debugging used to cause the IDE to chug while it scanned everything.
They clearly are the state of the art of IDEs for most mainstream languages nowadays.
It's easy for young developers to overlook the power of intellij IDES, and to use the "sexier" vscode.
But clearly for any medium to large project, learning to master intellijs are one of the highest ROI that a developer can get.
I generally prefer JetBrains' IDEs over vscode. However, vscode's remote editing capabilities just tipped the scale for me.
Not too long ago I bought a "powerful" laptop (expensive!). It still chocked frequently when running multiple vm's, docker machines and/or multiple "auto-compile watchers".
Then I tried vscode remote editing. I just run the browser & vscode in the laptop, and everything else on the desktop. It makes for a much, much nicer experience overall.
JetBrains, if this somehow gets to you: please copy vscode's remoting abilities and I'll be back. Until then... I had a great time with you.
What's the point of tribalism? It's a natural human tendency to be protective of what's close to your heart and reject things you're unfamiliar with.
Every single HN post about either Emacs, IntelliJ, Vim, VSCode, or Atom always gets riddled with disingenuous comments of people who liked one thing more than other things. Things they either haven't tried or had some cursory experience with them.
These tools are very individual [just like toothbrushes], for someone Emacs offers something that IntelliJ or VSCode can't, for others - nothing is better than Vim.
To truly achieve mastery, one has to try and learn them all and choose a tool that works well for the situation or the one they like (for objective and subjective reasons). Some might say: "that's a waste of time", try saying that to musicians. Go tell James Hetfield of Metallica that he shouldn't be trying all sorts of different guitars because Gibson is hands-down the best.
I'd go so far as to say Intellij and eclipse are one of the biggest reasons for Java and python's success. Those two languages came about during an IDE revolution and it made them so much more accessible.
Ctrl+Shift+A to find ANY action in the whole IDE + ability to customize almost everything is the peak performance of UX. Everybody should learn from JetBrains. Tools made for developers by developers <3
I'm a really big fan of JetBrains. The pricing is reasonable, the pricing model is reasonable, and the products are moving forward quickly.
There's a lot of products I am either reluctant to pay for, or pay for only begrudgingly, because I feel like I have to, even though the value proposition isn't really there. JetBrains isn't like that!
They seem to have nice products but when people compare JetBrains tooling to Vim, Emacs and VSCode everyone seems to leave out the fact that those tools are 100% free. I think it’s important for coding to be open to as many people as possible and the tools are the point of entry.
IntelliJ is a big part of it, tho. JVM languages, plus all supported languages that they don’t have a variant for (it has a decent first party Rust plugin, for instance).
These tools are not 100% free (as in beer) when you factor in your time. I spent years ($$) customizing my Vim setup and saved tons of time ($$) when I finally switched to IntelliJ with IdeaVim.
Well, I have an opposite experience. I have used IntelliJ for about 7 years. I still sometimes receive notifications for tickets that I have either submitted or upvoted. Some of them are started in 2014.
I switched to Emacs and that gave me enormous freedom to change things to my liking instead of just learning how to live with the way how IntelliJ people envisioned it. So one can say: switching to Emacs saved me years of waiting for the features I wanted in IntelliJ.
Sometimes brewing your own beer gives you much better satisfaction that you can't buy with any kind of money. And you can say it's 100% free beer, but it is not, when you factor your time.
They are free as in free beer. Your “time and money are direct equivalents” argument is nonsense even to the wealthiest people and sheer lunacy to the people who most need free coding tools.
If you are still a student at the end of the year, you just need to verify your student status again to get another one. Once you're not a student anymore, there's the discount offer.
I'll second detaro, when I was a student, I just had to re-verify and I think re-activate, though I believe the re-activation is automatic if activated with an account rather than a license key.
Also remember that despite of what their balance-sheet and financials say (which are impressive no doubt) they built a simple but solid product. Simple in a sense they did not run after the buzzwords of deep learning, in the cloud and all that stuff. It was a replacement for Eclipse and Netbeans which have been around for decades but a far far superior product.
Their revenue might look like just $270M but the value they have added by sheer gain in developer productivity across the world will run into several billions.
One of my favourite dev tools, and a personal sweetheart company as well. The way they handled the subscription transition was very amicable and gave me a lot of respect for them. They could have easily gone the way of Adobe.
The software is worth every penny, and having tried many alternatives, I'm hoping I will never have to give it up. Even if they go out of business, so long as I have a matching JRE for my OS it should be useful to me until I no longer need or can write software.
Android Studio is a special build of IDEA focusing on Android. It’s like PyCharm. You get IDEA with some features removed and certain plugins pre-installed and defaults set. Personally I like using their specific IDE’s for their tasks, but I could imagine that you can easily replace Android Studio with IDEA and not have any difference (besides more features being available).
Can't imagine writing software without their life saving intuitive IDEs. The keyboard shortcuts and powerful navigation features along with the excellent integration they have pushes them out of the league. I automatically start to hate other development platforms like XCode which is so backward. Only for small edits will I use VS Code or Sublime which in my POV never caught up to Jetbrains and probably never will.
I want to like JetBrains and paid for an ultimate subscription for years, but this four-year-old bug renders their products pretty much unusable on macs with a 5k display: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-526 . Thus, I've canceled my subscription and moved to vscode for most development.
It's disappointing to see bugs slowly creep into their products and stay version over version. I have the All Products Pack and most versions are currently pinned to 2019.1.4 which has the most bearable balance of bugs and new features.
Really? I use IntelliJ on an external 4k display every day at work with a 2016 MBP. I seem to recall having some issues in early 2017 (when I started at $company), but nowadays it works fine.
EDIT: I'm quite sure I have scaled resolution but can't check.
I'm always amazed by how a complex software as IDEA seems so crisp, I'm always thinking the internal structure must be very well pieced together, there are a lot of small things and small features that you'd think would not have polish but then it's all working flawlessly. Really want to study their code one day(although it's been years I'm saying that) :t
I think with a program of that size and complexity, it will be memory hungry no matter what language it's written in. Visual Studio is a C++ application if I'm not mistaken, and it can be sluggish and slow for larger projects.
Agreed. I hate using Java apps on the desktop. It is OK if your target is java itself, but I wouldn't start a java app to develop Python or some other language.
I used to think the same, but I’ve literally never found an IDE as feature complete (both built in/first party plugins and via 3rd party plugins) as IDEA.
Those that come close are not “native” either. Trading the jvm for xul/scintilla (Komodo) or fucking electron, to get worse productivity and say “it isn’t jvm” is stupid IMO.
Have you ever used PyCharm? It's head and shoulders better than any other IDE for Python out there. A slight delay whenever you restart is worth the productivity improvements it grants the rest of the time.
IDEA Ultimate can definitely be heavy on memory. It's currently using 3.5GB with one project/10 file tabs open. It's literally part of the reason I use a machine with 64GB of RAM (IDEA with a couple of projects open, plus 5-10 VMs = a metric fuck ton of memory used).
But how much of that is specifically because of the JVM and how much is just because of what it is, cannot be compared fairly IMO, because as I said in another sub-thread, theres literally nothing that has the same level of functionality across so many languages and platforms.
IMO it’s a no-brainer to pay $20 a month for PHPStorm. I easily save $20 a day in time through the easy class/use resolution, function parameter display and the semantic “spell” checking that highlights missing braces, semicolons, etc. And then there’s the whole xdebug works over ssh tunnels thing I couldn’t ever get to work with vscode + plugin.
With this much revenue... can they eventually divert some to providing a 'live share' service like vscode offers? I would think it would be a service they could possibly even uncharge for - I would pay a few $ more for a 'plus' version which offers 'share my project with other jetbrains users for pairing'.
While Rider might be a nice IDE, it can't use Visual Studio extensions. I use some commercial ones which increase my productivity. I can't see myself not using Visual Studio. I use the Enterprise version of VS. There's no other IDE with all the features I have.
A good example of why the status quo of VC funding companies is essentially wrong IMO. This year we have stories about startups getting massive amount of VC funding and turn into a flop (wework) and then we have this company which got $0 funding and became a success.
> A good example of why the status quo of VC funding companies is essentially wrong IMO. This year we have stories about startups getting massive amount of VC funding and turn into a flop (wework) and then we have this company which got $0 funding and became a success.
From what I understand, the VC funding model is toxic for sustainable, profitable businesses that successfully sell products in some niche. VCs either want your business to have a 0.1% chance of being the next Facebook or be something that a FAANG might want to buy out, and if your business isn't one of those things, they'll make you "pivot" and turn it into one.
JetBrains is a good example of the kind of technology companies we need more of.
I subscribe to several JetBrains products personally and also at work. Their pricing is reasonable in both situations and the products work well. It’s a refreshing experience all around. I’m happy to see this simple, reasonable approach find success.
I don't have much to add here other than to say I've been a JB customer since 2012. They've always provided excellent products with sensible licensing and I'm hoping they don't abandon their current business model.
I wonder what would have happened if they had gone the typical silicon valley VC route. Probably something less customer friendly with more invasive tracking, in order to "properly monetize their userbase".
Not surprising. Their ide suite is just that amazing. Been using them since I was offered an edu license (all products for free if you had an edu addy) some years ago and have since converted to a personal license.
Jet Brains is another example that OpenSource doesn’t kill industries or companies. JB won over Eclipse and Netbeans with great products, great customer service and fair licensing options and prices.
JetBrains products are excellent, I have both personal and work subscriptions. I wish MPS would catch on, though; it’s really exciting technology that way too few people are using, for some reason.
Makes me wonder if we'll start to more investments at earlier stages because startups usually need to prove their business plan before they see outside cash
It’s hard for me to praise Jetbrains, every time I start using Idea I have amazing experience, I feel like it’s totally one of the best IDEs out there and then couple days and non-trivial plugins later I have noticeable lags when typing text. I immediately give up and switch back to my previous setup. Why can’t IDEs prioritize reducing typing latency? That’s like one of the most important parts of text editing.
Anybody else had similar experience?
Edit: not trying to rain on Jetbrains parade here, I’m genuinely happy they have a business model that works and products that sell well.
This finds JB editors to be good for typing latency, and mirrors my experience. I keep my number of plugins to a minimum, check if disabling your plugins improves the issue.
I have a feeling JetBrains's products work well for most but not all types of projects.
Anecdotally, I suffer from performance issues on a very high performance desktop when doing data science. Indexing happens frequently and takes at least 30 minutes. Notebooks and scientific mode bug out frequently, even after a fresh install and in brand new environments. Judging by YouTrack, these issues are not isolated to just my machine and workflow.
I hope they figure them out soon because JetBrains's software is otherwise exceptional.
The only JetBrains IDE I've used is Rider, but AFAIK they are all based on IntelliJ - in 2-3 years of use, I don't recall ever experiencing lag when typing. I actually think it's one of the most performant and responsive IDEs I've ever used.
For reference, I primarily use it on Windows, with 64GB of RAM, but also use it on MacOS with 32GB of RAM and on another Windows machine with only 16GB of RAM.
I’ve found it to be generally pretty good for latency recently, though it did have serious issues on MacOS at least a few years back. Certainly far better than VS Code.
(On a 2016 15” work MBP and a 2016 13” home one)
One thing you may find useful if you have the memory is raising the max heap size a bit. The default is inadequate for very large projects IME.
I can’t tell you how many times my use of very vanilla Emacs with zero jedi / autocomplete / search features has saved me in my career.
It’s so critical to use text editors for software development and extract all other functionality to separate shell tools.
If a mix of very simple vim or Emacs + grep / git grep / silver searcher + CLI tools for automatic linting, test cases, etc., isn’t efficient for you, and motivates you to bring all these things into one consolidated IDE, I urge you to consider that this is a type of bad code smell and bad workflow smell, the all-in-one IDE is not actually helping productivity but hurting it in the long run, and you should invest right away in the learning curve & barriers you perceive are blocking you from a purely shell command-line workflow that separates code management & search into isolated utilities in separate interfaces.
I do grant there are a very small number of use cases where the IDE approach is useful: helping students who are literally just starting out, helping developers with atypical accessibility constraints that can be assisted with the IDE, probably a few more.
But general code search, linter/test integration, and embedded features like autocomplete, pop-up signatures or docs, etc., are disastrously bad things hands down for regular development.
It’s such a shame that a whole generation of programmers are tricked into believing those things are good for them.
It reminds me of people tricked into becoming reliant on MATLAB or Jupyter notebooks, and then retroactively trying to defend those tools as productivity-enhancing when they are, from first principles, productivity destroyers.
Comments like this were part of the reason I wasted a lot of time earlier in my career trying to use emacs or vim on large code bases instead of an IDE.
I suspect this is some tribal identity thing about being a “real” programmer that I fell victim too.
The IDEs are extremely powerful and much better out of the box for working in a large code base. They allow you to navigate a lot more easily and focus on the code itself rather than constantly having to deal with your setup.
Don’t let comments like the parent scare you away from them.
I know a couple of people holding the same opinion as OP. Can't say they are more productive.
The percentage of people that are hard to work with is higher in this group though.
And I know, what I'm talking about here. Started with a Commodore 64 in 1982, first Linux 1994. Did everything in emacs, calculated mode lines, Unix was my IDE, you name it.
I'm a very happy user of CLion and IntelliJ IDEA now. Wouldn't want to go back to the dark ages.
> “I know a couple of people holding the same opinion as OP. Can't say they are more productive.
The percentage of people that are hard to work with is higher in this group though.”
This seems more telling about your attitude towards this subject, and perhaps also lesser skill in assessing or understanding those productivity differences.
Use what works best, but Emacs is incredibly powerful, and certainly has the potential to make you more productive. I wish I had taken the time to learn Emacs earlier in my career, my task efficiency has increased significantly since converting my work flows.
It does take a long time to learn relative to plug and play solutions (especially for someone like me with decades of old habits), luckily I had a few months off from work for the transition. The investment has been well worth it, it helps if you like lisp :)
Disclaimer: I use and advocate for tools derided above: linter/test integration, embedded features like autocomplete, etc.
Yeah, that was the bit that got me. Emacs is in many ways the original IDE; insisting that people not use things like method signature hinting feels vaguely perverse.
Method signature hinting and other forms of autocomplete-like functionality are very actively harmful to productivity and prevent you from holding a mental model of the codebase. The larger the codebase, the worse this effect gets and the more critical it is to only approach writing code when you’ve got a sufficiently burned in mental model of the subsystem you’re dealing with, by searching and reading code with tools & interfaces wholly distinct from what you use for writing code.
It’s like the difference between someone who can navigate the highway system with interstate signs & atlases alone vs someone who is unable to navigate at all without a GPS system.
Even if the GPS system experiences no downtime, they still lack skills that make the driving lower quality, like anticipating changes or adjusting for weather.
Coders heavily reliant on IDE tools simply understand the ramifications of what they are writing less well, because they haven’t invested in the mental map of the code and mistakenly believe they can safely offload many parts of that cognitive requirement to an IDE.
Worst of all, they believe that code shipped this way is somehow reinforcing evidence that the IDE was a value additive tool, which is the wrong counterfactual for comparison. You have to consider the value lost from what better solution could otherwise have been shipped for lower cost using a different set of tools.
> But general code search, linter/test integration, and embedded features like autocomplete, pop-up signatures or docs, etc., are disastrously bad things hands down for regular development.
Many years of experience leading software teams and watching these tools hold back younger engineers time and again. Random breakages, surprise integration quirks, facilitating confusion of the design principles in the underlying code they only see through the IDE, inability to do necessary work in environments that can’t support the IDE (like during an outage that requires access to a different environment for a change). It’s been one of the most common patterns of lost productivity I’ve seen in my career, across many companies and many cohorts of engineers that would control for virtually any confounders, leaving me only to believe it’s the principle of using IDE assistance for these things.
Indeed - and those investing in higher-level languages such as assembly or C (gasp!) are tricked into believing those things are good for them - when really, they should be investing in learning machine languages, the purest form of programming for general-purpose processing circuits. /s
Honestly, programming languages, IDEs, Jupyter notebooks, etc. are all tools to help individuals solve problems using general-purpose processors. If you feel equally productive without some of those tools, that's fine, but there's nothing wrong with using those tools if they help.
i was initially confused, why would you want to jump or even convert between the '<' and '>' signs? but from trying it out on that snippet, '%' actually jumps to the nearest bracket and selects(?) the matching one [0].
now, i'm not 100% sure on the exact behaviour, but e.g. even a cursory test in sublime shows it will highlight the start and end brackets if i'm inside the if-expression and you can "expand selection to brackets".
> But general code search, linter/test integration, and embedded features like autocomplete, pop-up signatures or docs, etc., are disastrously bad things hands down for regular development.
I honestly can’t tell if this is a spoof “ how hackernews can I make it?” comment or not. What, precisely, is bad about those things? Would there be some virtue in my knowing every method signature in the enormous code base I work on from memory?
You are delusional and immature. I've seen experienced Vim/Emacs kiddies like you really struggle to keep up with my productivity levels in IDEA with JVM languages. Doing everything at the command line doesn't make you 1337 and superior. The actual typing and manipulation of text is the least complex side of development. Most of my time is spent thinking, analyzing, rather than monkeying with text. However I use Vim keybindings in IDEA and get the best of both worlds. Efficient text editing + advanced semantic parsing at a level that Vim and Emacs will never achieve.
If you actually read his comment, I think you'll agree this was an accurate and fair assessment. I've worked with those kids who believe they're super smart and others are simpletons purely based on tool preferences.
You don't have nearly enough information to draw that conclusion about someone from an internet comment. However, even if you're right, it misses the point. The point isn't that you owe $commenter better, it's that you owe the community better. Personal attacks poison the well and invite others to do worse. The community here is fragile. If you want to participate, you need to help preserve it, not help destroy it.
You're not just wrong, you're also rude, which is a sign of immaturity. Professionals try to avoid that kind of language.
If you never learned Vim to the sufficient level, you will never understand how incredibly empowering and powerful it is for navigating and editing text. And that IdeaVim is hopelessly lacking many of its features.
And if you never gotten in Emacs to the point of writing your own Emacs-lisp packages you will never learn true level of extensibility capabilities of Emacs. There's simply no other tool in existence that lets you do some borderline batshit crazy stuff.
When you don't know what you're talking about, at least have some respect for those who do. I personally used your beloved tools for about seven years (to the degree of above advanced level). I switched to Emacs (with Evil-mode), because I felt that I grew out of IntelliJ. Tell me about maturity.
Wasn't clear what you were aiming at with your comment. (And typically, I'd read "X-based" as "has HQ in X", nothing more. Normal in this industry for companies to be widely spread)
I'm certainly sympathetic to the frustration of having to support every previous version of your software. If upgrades cost money, then people are incentivized to stay on old versions and then complain about bugs that have been fixed since then, and you can't tell them "just upgrade" because they don't want to pay to upgrade. Web companies almost never need to support old versions of the website, for example, and that makes them much easier to manage from an engineering and customer support standpoint.
You are downvoted but I kind of agree. I don't think their IDEs improved a lot / more since the subscriptions. Indexing is still a resource hog, RAM usage out of control etc.
I also dislike their insistence on copying the grey Adobe's UIs.
I think their model is pretty fair. You subscribe and then are entitled to use that version forever, even if you end your subscription. What you gain in the subscription is the right to use newer versions.
For the stuff I really rely on, I feel good knowing there's a reasonable business model behind it. The ultimate version is $500 / year or $149 / year for business and personal respectively. For a lot of use cases, it doesn't need to save you very much time to pay for itself.
I disagree, although when they first switched to this model (a good while back now), I had the same reaction as you.
On reflection, I think it's a fair model, and fair pricing. They even reduce the renewal price if you renew after the 1st and 2nd years (maybe even more, I don't recall exactly).
Fact is that I love JetBrains products, so I want them to stick around - I want to pay using a subscription model, because that will make it a whole lot more likely.
I use Pycharm and it's such a superior product that I'm happy to support them so they can continuing development. plus it's a pretty nominal fee from an enterprise development cost perspective so it's an easy budgetary sell.
As others said, the community edition is free and extremely capable, so I don't see a reason to complain. It's fantastic that I can use my professional job to support development that benefits free users.
Their FAQ page explains it a lot better than I can: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...