6 ms·

I think Fleet's their hopeful answer to VSCode. IntelliJ is powerful, but so, so messy, with a convoluted UI from the 90s/2000s. Even the simplified one is much

I think Fleet's their hopeful answer to VSCode. IntelliJ is powerful, but so, so messy, with a convoluted UI from the 90s/2000s. Even the simplified one is much klunklier than VSCode, especially for everyday/every-hour tasks like NPM scripts, debugging, etc. Every essential function is hidden in tiny competing side panels triggered by some obscure icon in a different part of the screen. I love and use Jetbrains IDEs every day, but after a decade I still only find their UIs merely tolerable. Many of my colleagues try them out for an hour or two and then jump ship back to VSCode just because the initial "wtf is going on" factor is so high =/ I'm guessing Fleet was their answer, an opportunity to develop a greenfield UI for a new generation of devs raised with UX (vs the old guard of IntelliJ users from past decades). It made sense, until AI suddenly took over everything and nobody cared what your IDE UI is like anymore.

nprateem 2y ago
[flagged]
- MattPalmer1086 2y ago
  I see no flamebait. Your own post is much more flamebaity.
homebrewer 2y ago
You forgot to add "IMHO". IDEA has fantastic UI, it's fully configurable and 100% usable through pre-assigned hotkeys. For example, fuzzy search is available everywhere, in every tool window, in the database window, in search results, etc. The same key combination (ctrl+alt+arrow up/down on my instance) can be used to jump between search results, symbol usages, TODOs, linter results, and so on. They thought through and implemented countless convenient features, most of which I will not be able to remember, but do use every day purely through muscle memory. They're also now intent on destroying them in favor of the "new" primitive UI by trying to cater to new users (who are seemingly fine with never becoming power users). The good UI is still available through a plugin, but it's obvious it will be dropped in the next few years. I'm pretty sure they will lose the old guard like me right after that.
- tommica 2y ago
  Yep, I'm glad for their "Classic UI" plugin - I really dislike working with the new one, it's too VSCody for my liking.
- solardev 2y ago
  I mean, I did start the post with an "I think"... it's pretty clearly an opinion, no? I also don't think that's some obscure hypothesis on my part. It was just the zeitgeist at the time Fleet first came out (https://developers.slashdot.org/story/21/12/04/1655249/jetbrains-announces-fleet-ide-to-compete-with-microsofts-visual-studio-code https://developers.slashdot.org/story/21/12/04/1655249/jetbr...)... seemed obvious that it was to counter VSCode. Fleet's own homepage says "We envisioned Fleet as a coding tool with a clear minimalist design that doesn’t overwhelm and helps keep you focused." I'm not trying to convince anyone that one look & feel is better than another, just point out that there IS a generational divide (my guess) or at least a divide (of SOME sort) between those who prefer dense UIs and those who prefer simpler ones. My younger coworkers especially seem to struggle with the full-blown IntelliJ – it's just a trend I noticed, not some deep scholarly analysis. It's part of a generational fashion trend towards more whitespace and less information density. Jetbrains already risked quite a flame war when they launched the "simplified UI" for IntelliJ, to a very mixed love-it-or-hate-it reception. They realized they couldn't change the existing UI too much without alienating some % of their existing users. So Fleet was a way to instead make an alternative, sharing some of the same backend but with a different enough UI for those who want it. I doubt it's ever going to replace the traditional IntelliJ UI, especially now that they're refocusing efforts on AI stuff instead of minimalist UIs.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  > They're also now intent on destroying them in favor of the "new" primitive UI by trying to cater to new users (who are seemingly fine with never becoming power users). I am a power user of my tools. It is sad when a tool gets simplified and have configurations deleted, it is like getting rid of "Advanced" option, essentially.
- graypegg 2y ago
  Genuine question, what are you missing from the old UI? I am still maybe not a “fan” of the new UI, but I’ve since gotten pretty proficient with it and I genuinely can’t think of anything that’s impeding me. I think the general information density dropped somewhat, but a lot of the old UI was noise. I don’t need a big file path taking up 60% of the top toolbar. Nor a default Jetbrains space logo just sitting there. Why do I need a disabled stop button when no task/debug job is running? The old VCS tools were quick to access but it was also just 3 arrows next to the word “GIT:”. That’s a bit clunky and hard to click isn’t it? And it’s not like I need to optimize milliseconds on “updating this branch”. It happens a lot but opening a menu is the same amount of effort while not requiring close hit targets. No matter your muscle memory, you’ll nudge 16px over every once in a while. (<shiftshift> pull <return> also being my preferred way to pull/any VCS action anyway, so the point is moot) Maybe my one main complaint is the side panes. I still loathe the hieroglyphic buttons. I would love a return to the sensible vertical text labels… but even then I realize I never change the order of those panes, so it’s not like I’m ever unsure of which pane is which at this point. It feels… perfectly cromulent. I don’t really care at this point, if it helps new folks use IDEA IDEs, cool. Doesn’t affect my life at all now. And that’s coming from someone that does actually use the useful features of an IDE, and has been for a long time.
brandonmenc 2y ago
> with a convoluted UI from the 90s/2000s Some of us love this UI.
- sureIy 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - sunaookami 2y ago
    Not OP, but I'm not even 30 and heavily dislike the new UI.
  - MortyWaves 2y ago
    What would HN be without the agism and nasty remarks that somehow are always initiated by colour and theme preferences. Grow up.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- emptyfile 2y ago
  [dead]
doctorpangloss 2y ago
> Many of my colleagues try them out for an hour or two and then jump ship back to VSCode just because the initial "wtf is going on" factor is so high People who get hung up on the aesthetics of their IDEs are going to have other problems with programming generally.
grogenaut 2y ago
I'm the opposite, vs code feels so clunky to me and full of crappy bolted on low and mid quality plugins. Yes it's lower barrier to entry on making things and for editing configs but the configs are opaque, hard to find. Odd for microsoft that it's more of a linux mindset than windows. It feels so janky setting up run configurations or test runs.
- MortyWaves 2y ago
  Not to mention it hardly seems to support simply running things from package.json script section when doing JS stuff. Every time I try it seems to never quite work, or is very clunky and obtuse, sometimes requiring the creation of new files (???) to do it. Compare that with the other main IDE I use, Visual Studio. It works great.
- coldtea 2y ago
  >full of crappy bolted on low and mid quality plugins That's on you. What it comes with is great. And there's a huge selection of good third party plugins if one takes attention to what they install.
- phreack 2y ago
  I think how awful making run configurations is, is the one worst aspect of VSCode. tasks.json? launch.json? I just want the "run" button to run a custom build command and I could just not figure it out.
cosmic_cheese 2y ago
I feel similarly about IntelliJ IDEs as someone primarily coming from Xcode. Xcode has its own share of weaknesses, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I’m irritated more frequently by quirks of IntelliJ IDEs like how the sidebar palettes work in a way that they’re constantly at battle with each other and how super simple considerations like per-editor-pane back/forward/history are missing. They sometimes feel like they trip over the basics in pursuit of fancy gizmos.
brundolf 2y ago
My main barrier to IDEA is actually performance. Despite people's complaints about electron apps, VSCode is viscerally snappier in all the little interactions. I tried to switch to IDEA for the powerful features, but it always felt like mud I haven't tried Fleet but that could be part of it
- Aeolun 2y ago
  I thought fleet would be that snappy alternative, but then, in a fit of insanity, they decided to outsource all the actual non-render logic to the IDEA engine, and the whole thing was dead on arrival for me. Now I use Zed, which seems to be what Fleet should have been.
b_e_n_t_o_n 2y ago
My only problem with jetbrains UI is that it's slow. Night and day difference using even vscode, let alone vim, sublime, helix, zed, etc. I tolerate it because the functionality it brings, but I find myself actually writing code in something faster. And I don't see fleet improving on this in a meaningful way - it's basically a competitor to vscode, which I don't use for the same reasons I won't use fleet. There is a whole nother discussion about "progressive discovery" of functionality which I think is actually wrong although that would be a fringe view among "UX" specialists.
- nmfisher 2y ago
  Exactly this. Every time I revisit a Jetbrains product, I uninstall it within 5 minutes. It doesn't matter how great the features are, it's just sluggish. People can rag on Electron apps all they like, but VSCode on modern hardware is very snappy. Jetbrains is a noticeable downgrade.
  - winrid 2y ago
    Weird. None of my PCs have cpus made after 2018. After the initial indexing, things are fast. I guess that's what you're running into on startup.
    - indexedcosmoks 2y ago
      There are still things like opening a menu somewhere that has a random worst case latency of ~2 seconds for me. It feels random and is frustrating, but not quite enough where I'd consider learning to use something else
      - winrid 2y ago
        interesting, what menu? Just curious if I have gotten used to it. My desktop is a 2700x and my laptop is an 8th gen i7, hardly competitive nowadays. I usually have 3-6 IDE windows open. I think sometimes resolving TS types in Webstorm can take a few seconds after some changes. It's not Sublime Text fast, for sure.
noodletheworld 2y ago
> Many of my colleagues try them out for an hour or two and then jump ship back to VSCode just because the initial "wtf is going on" factor is so high =/ Really? I mean, the UIs are basically the same now. I have them open side by side on my desktop right now and they're both: - black boxes with a panel on the left of icons, then a tree of files, then a tabbed pane of open files. - clicking on the icons on the left opens some obscure subwindow depending on you magically knowing what the icon means. The only meaningful difference is that in vscode there's a command palette at the top where you can type in random stuff and get a list of actions, and in intellij you have to 'know' that the shortcut for that is 'press shift 3 times' instead of 'shift control p' ...but I mean, thats it; they're otherwise pretty much identical, practically. Honestly, anyone who opens intellij and then goes back to vscode because its too different is a numpty. Things work differently, and people don't like different things, and if they go back because it was different or the shortcuts are different, that's fair. It is disruptive. ...but, because the 'wtf is going on' factor is too high? Realllllllly? What does that even mean? Come on. They're not that different. If clicking on 'run' on the top right instead of on the left bar is too 'wtf', you really haven't made a real effort to try using the other IDE. (The same goes for old school intellij users who try vscode and then run away. Give it a decent shot before you walk away because it's too hard if the only hard thing is your keyboard shortcut muscle memory... vscode is pretty great) You only really see the deep differences when you use them extensively for things like refactoring and debugging.
- charrondev 2y ago
  On the topic of keyboard shortcuts I use both IntelliJ IDEs and VSCode every day. IntelliJ ships a “VSCode” keymap in the product that you can switch to with one option in the settings.
  - DangitBobby 2y ago
    VSCode also has a plugin for IntelliJ keybindings FWIW.
MortyWaves 2y ago
I’ve been trying DataGrip for SQL stuff after Azure Data Studio (a closed source fork of VS Code) was recently deprecated. It has all the same UI problems I remember of their other IDEs like WebStorm. Clunky and weird looking, and that’s coming from someone that appreciates generally Windows 9x style controls and palette, JetBrains just can’t get it right. As a side note one of the advertised features of DataGrip is its AI/LLM features which I thought was kind of cool after dealing with a terribly designed and legacy database; LLMs have really helped with refactoring. So once I got a license for DataGrip and then opened it the AI tool was no where to be seen. I had to go read the docs page online to find out I have to install the extension myself. Weird. The advertised AI feature is… behind another paywall with a seven day trial. Hang on, I just got DataGrip for its “included” AI support and you want to charge me for it anyway? I’m glad I got the license for free via their OSS support, but would I have bothered if I knew one of the main features is actually a separate paid feature? Probably not.
- conradfr 2y ago
  I mean adding AI without changing the IDE price would not make to much sense, financially. I would have love it though ;)
- joseda-hg 2y ago
  Ostensibly it's not one of the main features, Datagrip as a product has been a thing long before AI integration was even a thought
  - MortyWaves 2y ago
    It’s absolutely front and center of its marketing page.
    - mroche 2y ago
      It's (at least to me) fairly obvious from both the feature's dedicated page and DataGrip's purchasing page that the AI Assistant is an add-on cost.
satvikpendem 2y ago
I just started using Zed now for many things, it's still in development but it's getting there.

nprateem 2y ago

[flagged]

MattPalmer1086 2y ago
I see no flamebait. Your own post is much more flamebaity.

homebrewer 2y ago

You forgot to add "IMHO". IDEA has fantastic UI, it's fully configurable and 100% usable through pre-assigned hotkeys. For example, fuzzy search is available everywhere, in every tool window, in the database window, in search results, etc. The same key combination (ctrl+alt+arrow up/down on my instance) can be used to jump between search results, symbol usages, TODOs, linter results, and so on. They thought through and implemented countless convenient features, most of which I will not be able to remember, but do use every day purely through muscle memory. They're also now intent on destroying them in favor of the "new" primitive UI by trying to cater to new users (who are seemingly fine with never becoming power users). The good UI is still available through a plugin, but it's obvious it will be dropped in the next few years. I'm pretty sure they will lose the old guard like me right after that.

tommica 2y ago
Yep, I'm glad for their "Classic UI" plugin - I really dislike working with the new one, it's too VSCody for my liking.
solardev 2y ago
I mean, I did start the post with an "I think"... it's pretty clearly an opinion, no? I also don't think that's some obscure hypothesis on my part. It was just the zeitgeist at the time Fleet first came out (https://developers.slashdot.org/story/21/12/04/1655249/jetbrains-announces-fleet-ide-to-compete-with-microsofts-visual-studio-code https://developers.slashdot.org/story/21/12/04/1655249/jetbr...)... seemed obvious that it was to counter VSCode. Fleet's own homepage says "We envisioned Fleet as a coding tool with a clear minimalist design that doesn’t overwhelm and helps keep you focused." I'm not trying to convince anyone that one look & feel is better than another, just point out that there IS a generational divide (my guess) or at least a divide (of SOME sort) between those who prefer dense UIs and those who prefer simpler ones. My younger coworkers especially seem to struggle with the full-blown IntelliJ – it's just a trend I noticed, not some deep scholarly analysis. It's part of a generational fashion trend towards more whitespace and less information density. Jetbrains already risked quite a flame war when they launched the "simplified UI" for IntelliJ, to a very mixed love-it-or-hate-it reception. They realized they couldn't change the existing UI too much without alienating some % of their existing users. So Fleet was a way to instead make an alternative, sharing some of the same backend but with a different enough UI for those who want it. I doubt it's ever going to replace the traditional IntelliJ UI, especially now that they're refocusing efforts on AI stuff instead of minimalist UIs.
johnisgood 2y ago
> They're also now intent on destroying them in favor of the "new" primitive UI by trying to cater to new users (who are seemingly fine with never becoming power users). I am a power user of my tools. It is sad when a tool gets simplified and have configurations deleted, it is like getting rid of "Advanced" option, essentially.
graypegg 2y ago
Genuine question, what are you missing from the old UI? I am still maybe not a “fan” of the new UI, but I’ve since gotten pretty proficient with it and I genuinely can’t think of anything that’s impeding me. I think the general information density dropped somewhat, but a lot of the old UI was noise. I don’t need a big file path taking up 60% of the top toolbar. Nor a default Jetbrains space logo just sitting there. Why do I need a disabled stop button when no task/debug job is running? The old VCS tools were quick to access but it was also just 3 arrows next to the word “GIT:”. That’s a bit clunky and hard to click isn’t it? And it’s not like I need to optimize milliseconds on “updating this branch”. It happens a lot but opening a menu is the same amount of effort while not requiring close hit targets. No matter your muscle memory, you’ll nudge 16px over every once in a while. (<shiftshift> pull <return> also being my preferred way to pull/any VCS action anyway, so the point is moot) Maybe my one main complaint is the side panes. I still loathe the hieroglyphic buttons. I would love a return to the sensible vertical text labels… but even then I realize I never change the order of those panes, so it’s not like I’m ever unsure of which pane is which at this point. It feels… perfectly cromulent. I don’t really care at this point, if it helps new folks use IDEA IDEs, cool. Doesn’t affect my life at all now. And that’s coming from someone that does actually use the useful features of an IDE, and has been for a long time.

brandonmenc 2y ago

> with a convoluted UI from the 90s/2000s Some of us love this UI.

sureIy 2y ago
[flagged]
- sunaookami 2y ago
  Not OP, but I'm not even 30 and heavily dislike the new UI.
- MortyWaves 2y ago
  What would HN be without the agism and nasty remarks that somehow are always initiated by colour and theme preferences. Grow up.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
emptyfile 2y ago
[dead]

doctorpangloss 2y ago

> Many of my colleagues try them out for an hour or two and then jump ship back to VSCode just because the initial "wtf is going on" factor is so high People who get hung up on the aesthetics of their IDEs are going to have other problems with programming generally.

grogenaut 2y ago

I'm the opposite, vs code feels so clunky to me and full of crappy bolted on low and mid quality plugins. Yes it's lower barrier to entry on making things and for editing configs but the configs are opaque, hard to find. Odd for microsoft that it's more of a linux mindset than windows. It feels so janky setting up run configurations or test runs.

MortyWaves 2y ago
Not to mention it hardly seems to support simply running things from package.json script section when doing JS stuff. Every time I try it seems to never quite work, or is very clunky and obtuse, sometimes requiring the creation of new files (???) to do it. Compare that with the other main IDE I use, Visual Studio. It works great.
coldtea 2y ago
>full of crappy bolted on low and mid quality plugins That's on you. What it comes with is great. And there's a huge selection of good third party plugins if one takes attention to what they install.
phreack 2y ago
I think how awful making run configurations is, is the one worst aspect of VSCode. tasks.json? launch.json? I just want the "run" button to run a custom build command and I could just not figure it out.

cosmic_cheese 2y ago

I feel similarly about IntelliJ IDEs as someone primarily coming from Xcode. Xcode has its own share of weaknesses, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I’m irritated more frequently by quirks of IntelliJ IDEs like how the sidebar palettes work in a way that they’re constantly at battle with each other and how super simple considerations like per-editor-pane back/forward/history are missing. They sometimes feel like they trip over the basics in pursuit of fancy gizmos.

brundolf 2y ago

My main barrier to IDEA is actually performance. Despite people's complaints about electron apps, VSCode is viscerally snappier in all the little interactions. I tried to switch to IDEA for the powerful features, but it always felt like mud I haven't tried Fleet but that could be part of it

Aeolun 2y ago
I thought fleet would be that snappy alternative, but then, in a fit of insanity, they decided to outsource all the actual non-render logic to the IDEA engine, and the whole thing was dead on arrival for me. Now I use Zed, which seems to be what Fleet should have been.

b_e_n_t_o_n 2y ago

My only problem with jetbrains UI is that it's slow. Night and day difference using even vscode, let alone vim, sublime, helix, zed, etc. I tolerate it because the functionality it brings, but I find myself actually writing code in something faster. And I don't see fleet improving on this in a meaningful way - it's basically a competitor to vscode, which I don't use for the same reasons I won't use fleet. There is a whole nother discussion about "progressive discovery" of functionality which I think is actually wrong although that would be a fringe view among "UX" specialists.

nmfisher 2y ago
Exactly this. Every time I revisit a Jetbrains product, I uninstall it within 5 minutes. It doesn't matter how great the features are, it's just sluggish. People can rag on Electron apps all they like, but VSCode on modern hardware is very snappy. Jetbrains is a noticeable downgrade.
- winrid 2y ago
  Weird. None of my PCs have cpus made after 2018. After the initial indexing, things are fast. I guess that's what you're running into on startup.
  - indexedcosmoks 2y ago
    There are still things like opening a menu somewhere that has a random worst case latency of ~2 seconds for me. It feels random and is frustrating, but not quite enough where I'd consider learning to use something else
    - winrid 2y ago
      interesting, what menu? Just curious if I have gotten used to it. My desktop is a 2700x and my laptop is an 8th gen i7, hardly competitive nowadays. I usually have 3-6 IDE windows open. I think sometimes resolving TS types in Webstorm can take a few seconds after some changes. It's not Sublime Text fast, for sure.

noodletheworld 2y ago

> Many of my colleagues try them out for an hour or two and then jump ship back to VSCode just because the initial "wtf is going on" factor is so high =/ Really? I mean, the UIs are basically the same now. I have them open side by side on my desktop right now and they're both: - black boxes with a panel on the left of icons, then a tree of files, then a tabbed pane of open files. - clicking on the icons on the left opens some obscure subwindow depending on you magically knowing what the icon means. The only meaningful difference is that in vscode there's a command palette at the top where you can type in random stuff and get a list of actions, and in intellij you have to 'know' that the shortcut for that is 'press shift 3 times' instead of 'shift control p' ...but I mean, thats it; they're otherwise pretty much identical, practically. Honestly, anyone who opens intellij and then goes back to vscode because its too different is a numpty. Things work differently, and people don't like different things, and if they go back because it was different or the shortcuts are different, that's fair. It is disruptive. ...but, because the 'wtf is going on' factor is too high? Realllllllly? What does that even mean? Come on. They're not that different. If clicking on 'run' on the top right instead of on the left bar is too 'wtf', you really haven't made a real effort to try using the other IDE. (The same goes for old school intellij users who try vscode and then run away. Give it a decent shot before you walk away because it's too hard if the only hard thing is your keyboard shortcut muscle memory... vscode is pretty great) You only really see the deep differences when you use them extensively for things like refactoring and debugging.

charrondev 2y ago
On the topic of keyboard shortcuts I use both IntelliJ IDEs and VSCode every day. IntelliJ ships a “VSCode” keymap in the product that you can switch to with one option in the settings.
- DangitBobby 2y ago
  VSCode also has a plugin for IntelliJ keybindings FWIW.

MortyWaves 2y ago

I’ve been trying DataGrip for SQL stuff after Azure Data Studio (a closed source fork of VS Code) was recently deprecated. It has all the same UI problems I remember of their other IDEs like WebStorm. Clunky and weird looking, and that’s coming from someone that appreciates generally Windows 9x style controls and palette, JetBrains just can’t get it right. As a side note one of the advertised features of DataGrip is its AI/LLM features which I thought was kind of cool after dealing with a terribly designed and legacy database; LLMs have really helped with refactoring. So once I got a license for DataGrip and then opened it the AI tool was no where to be seen. I had to go read the docs page online to find out I have to install the extension myself. Weird. The advertised AI feature is… behind another paywall with a seven day trial. Hang on, I just got DataGrip for its “included” AI support and you want to charge me for it anyway? I’m glad I got the license for free via their OSS support, but would I have bothered if I knew one of the main features is actually a separate paid feature? Probably not.

conradfr 2y ago
I mean adding AI without changing the IDE price would not make to much sense, financially. I would have love it though ;)
joseda-hg 2y ago
Ostensibly it's not one of the main features, Datagrip as a product has been a thing long before AI integration was even a thought
- MortyWaves 2y ago
  It’s absolutely front and center of its marketing page.
  - mroche 2y ago
    It's (at least to me) fairly obvious from both the feature's dedicated page and DataGrip's purchasing page that the AI Assistant is an add-on cost.

satvikpendem 2y ago

I just started using Zed now for many things, it's still in development but it's getting there.