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> But by far the biggest moat that Jetbrains is going to have to cross to get into VSCode territory is the plugin ecosystem. Personally I work on React projects

> But by far the biggest moat that Jetbrains is going to have to cross to get into VSCode territory is the plugin ecosystem. Personally I work on React projects so my first thought was: "is there a Prettier[1] plugin?". This just reinforces my feeling that a major driver behind VSCode's popularity is that people just don't know better [1] 1. Download WebStorm (or IDEA) and write some React in it. And Typescript. Refactor. Move code around. Use suggestions. It's leaps and bounds ahead of VSCode 2. Open settings, navigate to plugins, type in Prettier. Oh look, there's the plugin. An official plugin from JetBrains [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=33176123 https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=33176123

mariusmg 4y ago
>It's leaps and bounds ahead of VSCode It's also paid vs free. For some reason, some people are very reluctant to pay for tools, even though they use them every day in their job.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > For some reason, some people are very reluctant to pay for tools, even though they use them every day in their job. This also really baffles me. You can see it a lot in various discussions even here on HN.
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    Because if your tooling is closed source (and if it's paid it almost certainly is) then your ability to maintain a project is dependent on some corporation's willingness to continue to support the tooling etc.
    - frou_dh 4y ago
      Not really in the case of Jetbrains vs VScode, because if the fateful day came, it would simply be an inconvenience to have to set up the alternative, not the end of the world.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      Most of intellij is open-source.
    - lolinder 4y ago
      If the possibility of your tooling being discontinued is a real concern for you, paying for a Jetbrains license is your best bet. Their entire business is developer tooling: IntelliJ isn't going away until Jetbrains goes under, and they're not going under until people stop paying them. Microsoft, on the other hand, could decide to drop VSCode at any point as soon as the bean counters start questioning how it's benefiting the bottom line. And if Microsoft decides to kill VSCode, I seriously doubt anyone is going to keep maintaining it at the place where it is now. Even if someone decides to continue maintaining the base editor, Microsoft abandoning it will pretty quickly dry up the plugin ecosystem. "It's open source, so it will always be available to me" only really makes sense if your backup plan is to maintain it yourself. In the case of VSCode, you are relying on a whole ecosystem continuing to survive after the sponsor abandons it.
      - mike_hearn 4y ago
        It's worth noting that JetBrains has a long history of successfully competing against free IDEs, which were normally always more popular than IntelliJ. First there was NetBeans (bought and open sourced by Sun very early), then there was Eclipse (developed and open sourced by IBM), now there is VSCode. Heck there are probably others I don't know about. So, this is nothing new for them. Usually what happens is that after enough years have passed, the company funding the free IDE starts to wonder why exactly they're spending so much money to give away the results. The original passion-project founders have moved on, leaving behind maintenance devs who aren't motivated to defend it. Eventually it gets stripped to a handful of devs and donated to Apache. In the meantime IntelliJ continues to develop new features. The question VSCode users might wonder about is what's Microsoft's strategy here? They have plenty of money, but then again so did Sun/Oracle and IBM. Is there a long term commercial plan to let the VSCode team justify themselves.
        vladvasiliu 4y ago
        > The question VSCode users might wonder about is what's Microsoft's strategy here? They have plenty of money, but then again so did Sun/Oracle and IBM. Is there a long term commercial plan to let the VSCode team justify themselves. Exactly, especially since VSCode is also an "open-core" product, just like JetBrain's products (the community versions are open-source). The difference is that the other parts are still free, as in beer. But this is precisely what makes the offer weird to me and makes me think there's a shady angle being played.
    - mrighele 4y ago
      As long as you can build the project with standard tools (e.g. npm for javascript, maven/gradle for Java etc.) you can survive your favorite IDE disappearing suddenly from one day to the other. It is more o less a requirement if you use CI/CD and a non issue anyway since any decent IDE can generate and synchronize a project using an external tools as a source of truth.
- rubyist5eva 4y ago
  Easy solution: make your employer pay for it. IntelliJ tools increase my productivity where saved time easily goes into days, it's easily justified from a cost perspective to an employer.
- fedorareis 4y ago
  It is precisely because I use it every day that I use VSCode. As much as I like some of the features of JetBrains IDEs I have also had more headaches with them than VSCode. For example at my previous employer our dev machines weren’t great and I routinely needed to have multiple projects open at once. If I tried doing that in IntelliJ it would make my computer basically unusable. When I gave up and used VSCode for all of my projects I was able to have all the projects I needed open without any issues and without really losing any productivity. If JetBrains IDEs were lighter on the system I would consider switching back to them, but honestly at this point I don’t see a benefit in switching back.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  > For some reason, some people are very reluctant to pay for tools, even though they use them every day in their job. I used to pay Jetbrains annually, out of my own pocket. I continued paying fir a personal license even after my employer bought me another license. Jetbrains then made a stupid, greedy decision[1] (and walked or back within days), but I was done with them and canceled my subscription. Since then, my experience/growth, languages tech stacks and codebases have connived to make Jetbrains superior discoverability moot (not using Java!), I found out other IDEs are good enough for me. 1. Some years back, they decided on an IDE-as-a-service path where they were going to brick your IDE the day your subscription lapsed. The fact that they thought this was acceptable and announced it means they cannot be trusted, IMO.
  - lemming 4y ago
    Some years back, they decided on an IDE-as-a-service path where they were going to brick your IDE the day your subscription lapsed. No they didn't. This is a total mischaracterisation of how JB's subscription works.
    - mardifoufs 4y ago
      I think they did, but then walked back and announced that you will just fallback to the previous version of whatever IDE you were subscribed to if you cancel the subscription. I think the situation caused quite a backlash when they announced the original plans.
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      I clearly mentioned they walked back the decision within days of the initial announcement. I don't understand how you could possibly have read my comment as describing their current licensing practices, with the tenses I was using. You can go read up on the disastrous announcement and the followup at https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/03/introducing-jetbrains-toolbox/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/03/introducing-jetbr...
      - lemming 4y ago
whycombagator 4y ago
Sure but WebStorm is targeted solely/mainly at JavaScript development. What if my employer has N repos and several other languages, and JavaScript is just one of those. VSCode allows me to stay with the same interface across multiple different repos. Yes, if I’m doing Ruby or Java or C# I might choose a _different_ IDE for certain tasks in that language. But with a few plugins you can get a reasonably good generalist tool in VSCode, and even a pretty full featured one for certain languages
- ethanbond 4y ago
  It's not. At least as far as I can tell, the different Jetbrains IDEs are more like configurations or flavors of the same underlying thing. You can do most things in most of their IDEs. You should try paying for an IDE. VSCode is great but if you're an engineer getting paid anywhere close to a Silicon Valley wage (or you can expense devtools), you deserve better :)
  - whycombagator 4y ago
    > It’s not. From the WebStorm page on JetBrains: > WebStorm The smartest JavaScript IDE WebStorm is an integrated development environment for JavaScript and related technologies. Like other JetBrains IDEs, it makes your development experience more enjoyable, automating routine work and helping you handle complex tasks with ease.
    - vladvasiliu 4y ago
      They come with a bunch of "pre-configurations". I used to have PyCharm, and now I've switched to IntelliJ. I can still do everything I could with PyCharm, which was itself a superset of WebStorm. Sure, some things are organized a bit differently, but basically, if you want to use multiple languages, just get IntelliJ, and you'll be set. It's cheaper than buying several other products, too. The only one that seems a bit different is CLion, in that it does things that IntelliJ doesn't, and vice-versa.
      - 4y ago
cztomsik 4y ago
> This just reinforces my feeling that a major driver behind VSCode's popularity is that people just don't know better I am very happy that VSCode is mostly just editor.

mariusmg 4y ago

>It's leaps and bounds ahead of VSCode It's also paid vs free. For some reason, some people are very reluctant to pay for tools, even though they use them every day in their job.

dmitriid 4y ago
> For some reason, some people are very reluctant to pay for tools, even though they use them every day in their job. This also really baffles me. You can see it a lot in various discussions even here on HN.
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  Because if your tooling is closed source (and if it's paid it almost certainly is) then your ability to maintain a project is dependent on some corporation's willingness to continue to support the tooling etc.
  - frou_dh 4y ago
    Not really in the case of Jetbrains vs VScode, because if the fateful day came, it would simply be an inconvenience to have to set up the alternative, not the end of the world.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    Most of intellij is open-source.
  - lolinder 4y ago
    If the possibility of your tooling being discontinued is a real concern for you, paying for a Jetbrains license is your best bet. Their entire business is developer tooling: IntelliJ isn't going away until Jetbrains goes under, and they're not going under until people stop paying them. Microsoft, on the other hand, could decide to drop VSCode at any point as soon as the bean counters start questioning how it's benefiting the bottom line. And if Microsoft decides to kill VSCode, I seriously doubt anyone is going to keep maintaining it at the place where it is now. Even if someone decides to continue maintaining the base editor, Microsoft abandoning it will pretty quickly dry up the plugin ecosystem. "It's open source, so it will always be available to me" only really makes sense if your backup plan is to maintain it yourself. In the case of VSCode, you are relying on a whole ecosystem continuing to survive after the sponsor abandons it.
    - mike_hearn 4y ago
      It's worth noting that JetBrains has a long history of successfully competing against free IDEs, which were normally always more popular than IntelliJ. First there was NetBeans (bought and open sourced by Sun very early), then there was Eclipse (developed and open sourced by IBM), now there is VSCode. Heck there are probably others I don't know about. So, this is nothing new for them. Usually what happens is that after enough years have passed, the company funding the free IDE starts to wonder why exactly they're spending so much money to give away the results. The original passion-project founders have moved on, leaving behind maintenance devs who aren't motivated to defend it. Eventually it gets stripped to a handful of devs and donated to Apache. In the meantime IntelliJ continues to develop new features. The question VSCode users might wonder about is what's Microsoft's strategy here? They have plenty of money, but then again so did Sun/Oracle and IBM. Is there a long term commercial plan to let the VSCode team justify themselves.
      - vladvasiliu 4y ago
        > The question VSCode users might wonder about is what's Microsoft's strategy here? They have plenty of money, but then again so did Sun/Oracle and IBM. Is there a long term commercial plan to let the VSCode team justify themselves. Exactly, especially since VSCode is also an "open-core" product, just like JetBrain's products (the community versions are open-source). The difference is that the other parts are still free, as in beer. But this is precisely what makes the offer weird to me and makes me think there's a shady angle being played.
  - mrighele 4y ago
    As long as you can build the project with standard tools (e.g. npm for javascript, maven/gradle for Java etc.) you can survive your favorite IDE disappearing suddenly from one day to the other. It is more o less a requirement if you use CI/CD and a non issue anyway since any decent IDE can generate and synchronize a project using an external tools as a source of truth.
rubyist5eva 4y ago
Easy solution: make your employer pay for it. IntelliJ tools increase my productivity where saved time easily goes into days, it's easily justified from a cost perspective to an employer.
fedorareis 4y ago
It is precisely because I use it every day that I use VSCode. As much as I like some of the features of JetBrains IDEs I have also had more headaches with them than VSCode. For example at my previous employer our dev machines weren’t great and I routinely needed to have multiple projects open at once. If I tried doing that in IntelliJ it would make my computer basically unusable. When I gave up and used VSCode for all of my projects I was able to have all the projects I needed open without any issues and without really losing any productivity. If JetBrains IDEs were lighter on the system I would consider switching back to them, but honestly at this point I don’t see a benefit in switching back.
sangnoir 4y ago
> For some reason, some people are very reluctant to pay for tools, even though they use them every day in their job. I used to pay Jetbrains annually, out of my own pocket. I continued paying fir a personal license even after my employer bought me another license. Jetbrains then made a stupid, greedy decision[1] (and walked or back within days), but I was done with them and canceled my subscription. Since then, my experience/growth, languages tech stacks and codebases have connived to make Jetbrains superior discoverability moot (not using Java!), I found out other IDEs are good enough for me. 1. Some years back, they decided on an IDE-as-a-service path where they were going to brick your IDE the day your subscription lapsed. The fact that they thought this was acceptable and announced it means they cannot be trusted, IMO.
- lemming 4y ago
  Some years back, they decided on an IDE-as-a-service path where they were going to brick your IDE the day your subscription lapsed. No they didn't. This is a total mischaracterisation of how JB's subscription works.
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    I think they did, but then walked back and announced that you will just fallback to the previous version of whatever IDE you were subscribed to if you cancel the subscription. I think the situation caused quite a backlash when they announced the original plans.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    I clearly mentioned they walked back the decision within days of the initial announcement. I don't understand how you could possibly have read my comment as describing their current licensing practices, with the tenses I was using. You can go read up on the disastrous announcement and the followup at https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/03/introducing-jetbrains-toolbox/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/03/introducing-jetbr...
    - lemming 4y ago

whycombagator 4y ago

Sure but WebStorm is targeted solely/mainly at JavaScript development. What if my employer has N repos and several other languages, and JavaScript is just one of those. VSCode allows me to stay with the same interface across multiple different repos. Yes, if I’m doing Ruby or Java or C# I might choose a _different_ IDE for certain tasks in that language. But with a few plugins you can get a reasonably good generalist tool in VSCode, and even a pretty full featured one for certain languages

ethanbond 4y ago
It's not. At least as far as I can tell, the different Jetbrains IDEs are more like configurations or flavors of the same underlying thing. You can do most things in most of their IDEs. You should try paying for an IDE. VSCode is great but if you're an engineer getting paid anywhere close to a Silicon Valley wage (or you can expense devtools), you deserve better :)
- whycombagator 4y ago
  > It’s not. From the WebStorm page on JetBrains: > WebStorm The smartest JavaScript IDE WebStorm is an integrated development environment for JavaScript and related technologies. Like other JetBrains IDEs, it makes your development experience more enjoyable, automating routine work and helping you handle complex tasks with ease.
  - vladvasiliu 4y ago
    They come with a bunch of "pre-configurations". I used to have PyCharm, and now I've switched to IntelliJ. I can still do everything I could with PyCharm, which was itself a superset of WebStorm. Sure, some things are organized a bit differently, but basically, if you want to use multiple languages, just get IntelliJ, and you'll be set. It's cheaper than buying several other products, too. The only one that seems a bit different is CLion, in that it does things that IntelliJ doesn't, and vice-versa.
    - 4y ago

cztomsik 4y ago

> This just reinforces my feeling that a major driver behind VSCode's popularity is that people just don't know better I am very happy that VSCode is mostly just editor.