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> I suspect part of what’s behind the pushback is the way some people are using JetBrains’ IDEs, which is that they actually point and click on all the buttons

> I suspect part of what’s behind the pushback is the way some people are using JetBrains’ IDEs, which is that they actually point and click on all the buttons and toolbars, etc. Precisely. And that's what I look for in an IDE: Good mouse support. > You will be 10x (barely an exaggeration) more productive if you learn to use the keyboard shortcuts. No, you won't. If the majority of your time isn't spent thinking rather than typing or clicking, you're doing it wrong. > I die a little bit inside anytime I watch another person reach for their mouse and navigate around the editor at a glacial pace. Then do it quietly, please. > Even if you don’t know a shortcut, it’s usually faster to search for that action (cmd + shift + a). Oh god no. > So, I personally don’t really get the pushback. Right, you don't. So don't rag on those who do. This new UI is terrible for my workflow because it removes the things I reach for the mouse to do. That's not something for you to judge me on.

armatav 4y ago
VSCode has a good balance of clickable + vim extension + command palette that helped solve this difference years ago.
hrunt 4y ago
> > So, I personally don’t really get the pushback. > Right, you don't. So don't rag on those who do. This new UI is terrible for my workflow. In my experience, when people say, "I don't get" something, what they usually mean is, "I don't want to get" that something. The author does not want to understand why people are pushing back; they just want people to stop pushing back. Note that I include myself in "people." I have done this myself and recognized it upon reflection (not with the JetBrains UI, but in other situations).
- jnsaff2 4y ago
  Sure, but the "I don't want to get something" comes from: "my system works for me, I don't need a change, it's being imposed on me". Change that is evolutionary can be good, that little tweak that REMOVES pain that you maybe don't even notice but feel better. There also can be change that is imposed by either product managers who have run out of ideas and need to anything to stay relevant or also by designers who don't use the product themselves but find lets say large padding to be aesthetically pleasing. For them the disruption is not felt, the information density is not lost. It looks good on a powerpoint slide.
soperj 4y ago
> No, you won't. If the majority of your time isn't spent thinking rather than typing or clicking, you're doing it wrong. There's a whole cohort of vim users that use only keyboard shortcuts and never think about any of them. The mouse sucks.
- foepys 4y ago
  Then why not just use vim and leave others alone? I never understood why some people cannot accept that their way of doing things is not working for everyone.
  - kstenerud 4y ago
    Because a disturbing number of people lack empathy, and so they feel a need to "fix" you or your way of thinking/working (or at the very least dismiss it).
  - soperj 4y ago
    I didn't touch your toy. Seems like Intelli-j just agrees. I personally was really annoyed when certain pieces of linux software removed the ability to change things, and when I contact the developer who changed it, they just said I was doing it the wrong way. First update there was at least a way to change it back, second update, they removed that option entirely. C'est la vie.
rapind 4y ago
I always thought a “Big Brother” opt-in mode would be cool. The IDE shows you the shortcut whenever it can when you do something with the mouse. It keeps a history and once you’ve done something [n] times with the mouse it forces you to use the shortcut, greying out the button with an overlay indicating the shortcut. You can of course configure the threshold and opt out completely (IMO it should be opt-in). I’m speaking as a vim user who gradually grew my repertoire of shortcuts over many years. I am very slow to incorporate new ones. The driver for me is my dislike for moving my hand off the KB. In fact I prefer a laptop touchpad to a mouse for programming so my hands stay put.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9792-key-promoter-x https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9792-key-promoter-x
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Happy Key Promoter X user here. I don't use JetBrains stuff much as I've been gradually building out a nice Neovim config with more IDE features, but when I do use it, I appreciate getting tips for keyboard shortcuts I use often, e.g. as part of my edit-test-debug workflow. The notification is unintrusive enough that I can ignore it for less-common workflows that I just use the mouse for.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dysoco 4y ago
> Precisely. And that's what I look for in an IDE: Good mouse support. I agree, I don't get the massive push for keyboard-only usage and terminal applications, I have a mouse and it's good for pointing at things and clicking, I don't want to stop using it! The keyboard is good for certain things, some shortcuts are nice, but too much become a hassle. There's a reason I'm not using Vim.
- adql 4y ago
  It's not that good at pointing at the space between characters tho, I find endless annoyance with inability to set paste to paste at cursor, not at current mouse position. I came to IDEA from Emacs and I used mouse there too but weirdly enough it feels worse in IDEA
- JaumeGreen 4y ago
  If I had more energy and time I would try to set my computer so that I could perform most of anything with keyboard only. My wrists are the reason. More than 10 years ago they started to hurt, so I became a left handed mouse user at work. A couple of years ago I started using a vertical mouse. If I could leave them in a mostly static position I would. There's the added fact that I'm much faster with keyboard only and I can perform the actions without effort once I have them ingrained. Mouse is slower and even when you know where to go it needs more of your brain. Having said this I'm perfectly ok with people preferring mouse, I'm just starting the reasons for my preferences. Not that they matter, I'm not using JetBrains.
  - drwicked 4y ago
    > If I could leave them in a mostly static position I would. If you haven't you should try a thumb trackball mouse like the Logitech MX Ergo, just move your thumb to move the cursor, significantly easier on the wrist. I've been using it as my only mouse for years.
aliasxneo 4y ago
Having recently come into the fold of "professional software development," I found the cultural push to abandon my mouse overwhelming. I do have a habit of using quite a few shortcuts, but perhaps only a half-dozen per tool. It seems to have a relationship with the push to do everything via CLI. I'm more than comfortable moving around a Linux system remotely, but I still prefer visual representations of git that I can interact with in my editor. I don't see why we can't have a healthy mix of both.
- kstenerud 4y ago
  > I don't see why we can't have a healthy mix of both. That's what the old UI has. The new UI pursues minimalism for the sake of minimalism, and alienates a huge chunk of their user base in the process.
aidenn0 4y ago
>> You will be 10x (barely an exaggeration) more productive if you learn to use the keyboard shortcuts. > No, you won't. If the majority of your time isn't spent thinking rather than typing or clicking, you're doing it wrong. Interacting with a GUI introduces latency to my interactions. If I think of something I can do with the keyboard, I can do it without disturbing my flow; if I have to e.g. start hunting through menus it is more likely to disturb my thought process and leave me at "what was I doing again?" I'm sure not everybody is this way, but I certainly am. [edit] A good, discoverable interface (mouse or otherwise) is important for casual users, new users, and infrequently used actions. At least some people (myself included) get a significant performance boost from being able to do things immediately from the keyboard though.
- arrakeen 4y ago
  if i wanna get down and dirty and code i use emacs but if i need to get acquainted with a new codebase, i'm going to be using an IDE and mostly the mouse. when you're following references 5-deep, it's going to be far quicker to have the mouse cursor go exactly where you're looking to ctrl+click. furthermore, smooth scrolling with a mousewheel makes it much easier for me to quickly scan through code as well
doix 4y ago
> No, you won't. If the majority of your time isn't spent thinking rather than typing or clicking, you're doing it wrong A lot of my time is spent reading code and going back and forth between different places in the codebase. Reducing the time between thinking "what does that function do" and seeing that code makes it easier for me to think When writing/editing code, the same applies. Reducing the time between thinking something and it happening makes it easier for me to keep what I'm trying to achieve in my head. That being said, I have a lot of sympathy for IntelliJ users. Change sucks, especially when it's forced upon you. I know it's not forced yet, but they'll change the default and make it harder and harder to use the old interface. Until the analytics show that the usage is very low and then remove it.
- kstenerud 4y ago
  > Change sucks, especially when it's forced upon you. Change doesn't suck; it's change for the worse that sucks. Saying "I have sympathy for you, change sucks" is not only patronizing, but also a way to dismiss the whole argument out of hand by implying that the people who complain are being irrational.
  - doix 4y ago
    That was not my intention, I genuinely have sincere empathy (I used the wrong word, my bad) for people that are negatively affected by these changes. I know what it's like, I've been bitten by similar things many times in the past and know how annoying it is. > Change doesn't suck; it's change for the worse that sucks. That's clearly subjective though, it's worse for you. For other people it's better. It sucks when you're on the wrong side of a change, that was my point. Personally, the old UI and the new UI don't solve the problems I have with JetBrains IDEs, so I'm fairly indifferent. I should have said that I empathize instead of sympathize though. Words are hard, but I definitely wasn't trying to be patronising.
    - kstenerud 4y ago
      I believe you. But I also believe that this change was made based on a false dichotomy of mouse vs keyboard. By removing most of the mouse-accessible components, they saved a few pixels on the X and Y at best, at the cost of completely alienating all of their mouse users. They could have simply improved their keyboard support while still maintaining the small band of toolbars. It would have been effectively the same result for keyboard folks without the hostile change imposed on mouse folks.
jcadam 4y ago
So you spend all that time and effort mastering an actually decent IDE, and then you take a job/client that forces you to use eclipse (it's always eclipse).
12345hn6789 4y ago
> No, you won't. If the majority of your time isn't spent thinking rather than typing or clicking, you're doing it wrong. If you have learned the hotkeys, you don't think about pressing them. How do you find things in the menu if you do not search for them? Legitimate question. I've been using jetbrain IDE's for years and still have to 2x shift search for things daily because navigating their (old) UI is terrible
- agumonkey 4y ago
  I agree, beside a few exceptions (photoshop/illustrator, 3d modeling/animation) I've never found a mouse to bring any benefits in terms of speed or even ergonomics. ps: that said, people who try to think about mouse interactions patterns can do wonders, Alias Wavefront labs used to make their software extremely fast with mostly mouse and a few keyboard modifiers. Briliant people.
ch_123 4y ago
I have been in plenty of pairing sessions with people using IntelliJ where the speed of thought was not the limiting factor, but the speed of navigating around the project was. There's a few critical shortcuts (particularly pressing shift twice) which in my experience speed up the process of moving around a codebase to make changes or just study what is going on. Of course, everyone (myself included) develops certain habits and gets comfortable with them, and there is a mental cost with replacing those habits with more efficient ones. I don't have any time for people who are overly smug about their knowledge of different keyboard shortcuts, but I think it's equally unhelpful to discount the value of keyboard shortcuts.

armatav 4y ago

VSCode has a good balance of clickable + vim extension + command palette that helped solve this difference years ago.

hrunt 4y ago

> > So, I personally don’t really get the pushback. > Right, you don't. So don't rag on those who do. This new UI is terrible for my workflow. In my experience, when people say, "I don't get" something, what they usually mean is, "I don't want to get" that something. The author does not want to understand why people are pushing back; they just want people to stop pushing back. Note that I include myself in "people." I have done this myself and recognized it upon reflection (not with the JetBrains UI, but in other situations).

jnsaff2 4y ago
Sure, but the "I don't want to get something" comes from: "my system works for me, I don't need a change, it's being imposed on me". Change that is evolutionary can be good, that little tweak that REMOVES pain that you maybe don't even notice but feel better. There also can be change that is imposed by either product managers who have run out of ideas and need to anything to stay relevant or also by designers who don't use the product themselves but find lets say large padding to be aesthetically pleasing. For them the disruption is not felt, the information density is not lost. It looks good on a powerpoint slide.

soperj 4y ago

> No, you won't. If the majority of your time isn't spent thinking rather than typing or clicking, you're doing it wrong. There's a whole cohort of vim users that use only keyboard shortcuts and never think about any of them. The mouse sucks.

foepys 4y ago
Then why not just use vim and leave others alone? I never understood why some people cannot accept that their way of doing things is not working for everyone.
- kstenerud 4y ago
  Because a disturbing number of people lack empathy, and so they feel a need to "fix" you or your way of thinking/working (or at the very least dismiss it).
- soperj 4y ago
  I didn't touch your toy. Seems like Intelli-j just agrees. I personally was really annoyed when certain pieces of linux software removed the ability to change things, and when I contact the developer who changed it, they just said I was doing it the wrong way. First update there was at least a way to change it back, second update, they removed that option entirely. C'est la vie.

rapind 4y ago

I always thought a “Big Brother” opt-in mode would be cool. The IDE shows you the shortcut whenever it can when you do something with the mouse. It keeps a history and once you’ve done something [n] times with the mouse it forces you to use the shortcut, greying out the button with an overlay indicating the shortcut. You can of course configure the threshold and opt out completely (IMO it should be opt-in). I’m speaking as a vim user who gradually grew my repertoire of shortcuts over many years. I am very slow to incorporate new ones. The driver for me is my dislike for moving my hand off the KB. In fact I prefer a laptop touchpad to a mouse for programming so my hands stay put.

5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9792-key-promoter-x https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9792-key-promoter-x
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Happy Key Promoter X user here. I don't use JetBrains stuff much as I've been gradually building out a nice Neovim config with more IDE features, but when I do use it, I appreciate getting tips for keyboard shortcuts I use often, e.g. as part of my edit-test-debug workflow. The notification is unintrusive enough that I can ignore it for less-common workflows that I just use the mouse for.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

dysoco 4y ago

> Precisely. And that's what I look for in an IDE: Good mouse support. I agree, I don't get the massive push for keyboard-only usage and terminal applications, I have a mouse and it's good for pointing at things and clicking, I don't want to stop using it! The keyboard is good for certain things, some shortcuts are nice, but too much become a hassle. There's a reason I'm not using Vim.

adql 4y ago
It's not that good at pointing at the space between characters tho, I find endless annoyance with inability to set paste to paste at cursor, not at current mouse position. I came to IDEA from Emacs and I used mouse there too but weirdly enough it feels worse in IDEA
JaumeGreen 4y ago
If I had more energy and time I would try to set my computer so that I could perform most of anything with keyboard only. My wrists are the reason. More than 10 years ago they started to hurt, so I became a left handed mouse user at work. A couple of years ago I started using a vertical mouse. If I could leave them in a mostly static position I would. There's the added fact that I'm much faster with keyboard only and I can perform the actions without effort once I have them ingrained. Mouse is slower and even when you know where to go it needs more of your brain. Having said this I'm perfectly ok with people preferring mouse, I'm just starting the reasons for my preferences. Not that they matter, I'm not using JetBrains.
- drwicked 4y ago
  > If I could leave them in a mostly static position I would. If you haven't you should try a thumb trackball mouse like the Logitech MX Ergo, just move your thumb to move the cursor, significantly easier on the wrist. I've been using it as my only mouse for years.

aliasxneo 4y ago

Having recently come into the fold of "professional software development," I found the cultural push to abandon my mouse overwhelming. I do have a habit of using quite a few shortcuts, but perhaps only a half-dozen per tool. It seems to have a relationship with the push to do everything via CLI. I'm more than comfortable moving around a Linux system remotely, but I still prefer visual representations of git that I can interact with in my editor. I don't see why we can't have a healthy mix of both.

kstenerud 4y ago
> I don't see why we can't have a healthy mix of both. That's what the old UI has. The new UI pursues minimalism for the sake of minimalism, and alienates a huge chunk of their user base in the process.

aidenn0 4y ago

>> You will be 10x (barely an exaggeration) more productive if you learn to use the keyboard shortcuts. > No, you won't. If the majority of your time isn't spent thinking rather than typing or clicking, you're doing it wrong. Interacting with a GUI introduces latency to my interactions. If I think of something I can do with the keyboard, I can do it without disturbing my flow; if I have to e.g. start hunting through menus it is more likely to disturb my thought process and leave me at "what was I doing again?" I'm sure not everybody is this way, but I certainly am. [edit] A good, discoverable interface (mouse or otherwise) is important for casual users, new users, and infrequently used actions. At least some people (myself included) get a significant performance boost from being able to do things immediately from the keyboard though.

arrakeen 4y ago
if i wanna get down and dirty and code i use emacs but if i need to get acquainted with a new codebase, i'm going to be using an IDE and mostly the mouse. when you're following references 5-deep, it's going to be far quicker to have the mouse cursor go exactly where you're looking to ctrl+click. furthermore, smooth scrolling with a mousewheel makes it much easier for me to quickly scan through code as well

doix 4y ago

> No, you won't. If the majority of your time isn't spent thinking rather than typing or clicking, you're doing it wrong A lot of my time is spent reading code and going back and forth between different places in the codebase. Reducing the time between thinking "what does that function do" and seeing that code makes it easier for me to think When writing/editing code, the same applies. Reducing the time between thinking something and it happening makes it easier for me to keep what I'm trying to achieve in my head. That being said, I have a lot of sympathy for IntelliJ users. Change sucks, especially when it's forced upon you. I know it's not forced yet, but they'll change the default and make it harder and harder to use the old interface. Until the analytics show that the usage is very low and then remove it.

kstenerud 4y ago
> Change sucks, especially when it's forced upon you. Change doesn't suck; it's change for the worse that sucks. Saying "I have sympathy for you, change sucks" is not only patronizing, but also a way to dismiss the whole argument out of hand by implying that the people who complain are being irrational.
- doix 4y ago
  That was not my intention, I genuinely have sincere empathy (I used the wrong word, my bad) for people that are negatively affected by these changes. I know what it's like, I've been bitten by similar things many times in the past and know how annoying it is. > Change doesn't suck; it's change for the worse that sucks. That's clearly subjective though, it's worse for you. For other people it's better. It sucks when you're on the wrong side of a change, that was my point. Personally, the old UI and the new UI don't solve the problems I have with JetBrains IDEs, so I'm fairly indifferent. I should have said that I empathize instead of sympathize though. Words are hard, but I definitely wasn't trying to be patronising.
  - kstenerud 4y ago
    I believe you. But I also believe that this change was made based on a false dichotomy of mouse vs keyboard. By removing most of the mouse-accessible components, they saved a few pixels on the X and Y at best, at the cost of completely alienating all of their mouse users. They could have simply improved their keyboard support while still maintaining the small band of toolbars. It would have been effectively the same result for keyboard folks without the hostile change imposed on mouse folks.

jcadam 4y ago

So you spend all that time and effort mastering an actually decent IDE, and then you take a job/client that forces you to use eclipse (it's always eclipse).

12345hn6789 4y ago

> No, you won't. If the majority of your time isn't spent thinking rather than typing or clicking, you're doing it wrong. If you have learned the hotkeys, you don't think about pressing them. How do you find things in the menu if you do not search for them? Legitimate question. I've been using jetbrain IDE's for years and still have to 2x shift search for things daily because navigating their (old) UI is terrible

agumonkey 4y ago
I agree, beside a few exceptions (photoshop/illustrator, 3d modeling/animation) I've never found a mouse to bring any benefits in terms of speed or even ergonomics. ps: that said, people who try to think about mouse interactions patterns can do wonders, Alias Wavefront labs used to make their software extremely fast with mostly mouse and a few keyboard modifiers. Briliant people.

ch_123 4y ago

I have been in plenty of pairing sessions with people using IntelliJ where the speed of thought was not the limiting factor, but the speed of navigating around the project was. There's a few critical shortcuts (particularly pressing shift twice) which in my experience speed up the process of moving around a codebase to make changes or just study what is going on. Of course, everyone (myself included) develops certain habits and gets comfortable with them, and there is a mental cost with replacing those habits with more efficient ones. I don't have any time for people who are overly smug about their knowledge of different keyboard shortcuts, but I think it's equally unhelpful to discount the value of keyboard shortcuts.