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The primary issue is that IDEA and other editors don’t allow the level of flexibility and customizability needed to make new experiences, unlike VSCode. Whether

by yunohn 2y ago

The primary issue is that IDEA and other editors don’t allow the level of flexibility and customizability needed to make new experiences, unlike VSCode. Whether new solutions need to fork it or not is a different question. For example, Cursor absolutely has made significant changes for user benefit that stock VSCode with Copilot doesn’t have.

lemming 2y ago
I’m a professional IntelliJ plugin developer, this is absolutely not true. IntelliJ is incredibly customisable, and you can always code raw swing to achieve whatever you want if there’s something that the base platform doesn’t provide.
- yunohn 2y ago
  Appreciate the added perspective, I wasn’t aware. But from my usage of IDEA’s product, I’ve yet to find an extension that makes any major changes to the UI/UX? I see them way more often in the VSCode community. In fact, I find the IDEA plugin system incredibly limited overall. Why do you think that’s the case? Or maybe I’ve been in a bubble and you can point to some interesting ones that I’ve maybe missed?
  - lemming 2y ago
    More than it not being possible, it's not regarded as desirable - IntelliJ users greatly value consistency. The fact that the experience is consistent across different languages is one of the things I like best about IntelliJ. Can you give me an idea of the sort of thing that you'd like to see that you haven't seen? Here's an example of something I recently added (an inline inspector), that my main competitor (VS Code) said wasn't possible with the VS Code APIs: https://cursive-ide.com/blog/cursive-1.14.0-eap1.html https://cursive-ide.com/blog/cursive-1.14.0-eap1.html. I have another major feature that I don't have good online doc for, which is also not possible with the VS Code API (parinfer, a Clojure editing mode). This gives you an idea of what it looks like, but this is old and my implementation doesn't work much like this any more: https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer.

by yunohn 2y ago

lemming 2y ago

I’m a professional IntelliJ plugin developer, this is absolutely not true. IntelliJ is incredibly customisable, and you can always code raw swing to achieve whatever you want if there’s something that the base platform doesn’t provide.

yunohn 2y ago
Appreciate the added perspective, I wasn’t aware. But from my usage of IDEA’s product, I’ve yet to find an extension that makes any major changes to the UI/UX? I see them way more often in the VSCode community. In fact, I find the IDEA plugin system incredibly limited overall. Why do you think that’s the case? Or maybe I’ve been in a bubble and you can point to some interesting ones that I’ve maybe missed?
- lemming 2y ago
  More than it not being possible, it's not regarded as desirable - IntelliJ users greatly value consistency. The fact that the experience is consistent across different languages is one of the things I like best about IntelliJ. Can you give me an idea of the sort of thing that you'd like to see that you haven't seen? Here's an example of something I recently added (an inline inspector), that my main competitor (VS Code) said wasn't possible with the VS Code APIs: https://cursive-ide.com/blog/cursive-1.14.0-eap1.html https://cursive-ide.com/blog/cursive-1.14.0-eap1.html. I have another major feature that I don't have good online doc for, which is also not possible with the VS Code API (parinfer, a Clojure editing mode). This gives you an idea of what it looks like, but this is old and my implementation doesn't work much like this any more: https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer.