by AlexeyBrin on 5/7/25, 12:18 PM with 388 comments
by paxys on 5/7/25, 2:36 PM
by hbn on 5/7/25, 1:51 PM
I may or may not have been abusing the fact that my university let me keep my email address as an alumni to squeeze more years out of their free access for students, though that seemed to stop working for me at some point a year or 2 ago. But I'll happily take this instead!
by geophile on 5/7/25, 7:30 PM
I started using Intellij with the 3.0 version, I think. It just worked, even on Linux. (It was existence proof that you could build excellent UIs in Java.) Unlike Eclipse, and other forgotten IDEs that were so bad I discarded them immediately. Even early on, their refactorings were usually flawless. While I think I found one screwup, they were so good that they changed the way I coded. I could easily and reliably do refactorings that were otherwise pretty time-consuming and error-prone. I have continued using their products: mostly PyCharm now, and occasionally CLion.
Each new release improves the UI, and occasionally adds features that I find useful, and many that I don't. I suspect that I'm not alone in using a very tiny portion of the features they offer. How they can keep up with all the languages, and libraries, and frameworks is beyond me, but they seem to do it.
Their support has always been excellent. I once (v4?) complained that refactorings did not extend into configurations. E.g., if I rename a class Foo to Bar, then the runtime configuration running Foo didn't reflect the change. I reported it, and found a fix in the next release. Email with technical questions or bug reports is always handled promptly and thoughtfully.
They have always provided absolutely fantastic products for free. Yes, you gave up some features, but the free versions are really useful. I'm retired now, but continue to pay their licensing fees every year, for my hobby usage, because it's worth it, and they earn it. And the licensing is not onerous to use. What I really like is that you don't have to be on the internet to use their products, just for the license check. I wish all licensed products did that.
And beyond all this: They haven't sold out. They are one of the very, very few for-profit tech companies that have maintained a stellar level of product breadth, depth, quality, and support for such a long period of time. I'm sure they could have cashed in, sold to IBM and the product would have just rotted away, (sorry, IBM, but you know it's true). I can only think of one product that is comparable in this way, and that's Postgres.
Thank you, JetBrains, you have Figured It Out.
by the__alchemist on 5/7/25, 5:19 PM
I experience major performance problems. They periodically bring my 9950 CPU to a crawl, or freeze, requiring a force-kill. (RustRover more so than PyCharm, but both are guilty). Memory hogs. (Feels like they leak memory). This is consistent behavior over the years, across a range of project styles.
I put up with the performance problems because of my first point!
The interesting/amusing part to me: My experiences do not seem wholly consistent with other users: Many users seem to find these IDEs heavy, but don't experience the freezes, crashes, or memory leaks. And many (most?) people claim VsCode is fine for managing multi-file projects. I don't know what to think!
by inetknght on 5/7/25, 2:33 PM
I've since moved on to new employers, but I'd love to check it out again.
> It’s important to note that, if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics. We use this information to improve our products.
Well, it's basically true for MS-branded VSCode too. I now use VSCodium.
But I'm heavily against Microsoft. I don't like usage statistics collection, but at least this is a direct competitor to Microsoft.
I had a chance to speak to some of the JetBrains folk at CppCon a couple years back. It was really nice and reassuring.
I'll check it out for personal projects and see if it's improved since years ago. :)
by discmonkey on 5/7/25, 1:19 PM
Here's hoping this won't be abused by smaller companies that will no longer want to pay for the actual subscription. I also wonder if they are moving towards a different funding model, since the IDE space is pretty competitive with a free alternative (VSCode) out there.
by 1over137 on 5/7/25, 12:50 PM
by perrygeo on 5/7/25, 4:21 PM
by pasoevi on 5/7/25, 1:29 PM
by deafpolygon on 5/7/25, 2:38 PM
"It’s important to note that, if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics. We use this information to improve our products. The data we collect is exclusively that of anonymous feature usages of our IDEs."
I'm aware it's common practice, but it's always good to read the fine print.
by FpUser on 5/7/25, 12:53 PM
by taylorallred on 5/7/25, 6:09 PM
by travisgriggs on 5/7/25, 3:10 PM
In the past when I tried CLion, I found that its need/desire to use cmake prohibited me from really using it. We have our own build scripts, and it seemed to struggle with that. Anyone know if that CMake bias still exists?
I ended up using Nova on my Mac for C code and have been pretty happy with that.
I would really really really love it if there was an Elixir skin for Jetbrains tools.
by sgt on 5/7/25, 2:23 PM
by hiq on 5/7/25, 1:31 PM
> Common examples of non-commercial uses include learning and self-education, open-source contributions without earning commercial benefits
What if I start writing code, let's say 80% of a codebase, then for the next 3 months I switch to another editor to write the next 20%, and then commercialize the support (so open-source but with commercial benefits)? Would it be about intent, i.e. it'd be fine if I had no plan to make a business out of it at the beginning, but as soon as there's the idea of a business I should have switched?
I guess in practice this mostly targets companies with 10+ employees so it's fine not to draw the line that clearly?
by wizrrd on 5/7/25, 2:33 PM
by demarq on 5/7/25, 5:17 PM
I suspect there’s a whole lot of devs who’ve never experienced paid IDEs vs VsCode. Plus the community is about to grow insane.
Interested to see what happens
by Alifatisk on 5/8/25, 12:52 PM
Another thing I would like to discuss is this (it's kind flimsy so bear with me), Jetbrains IDEs are good and clean. One thing I dislike with these IDEs is that they do a lot in the background that feels like is outside of my control. I can't really point my finger exactly to where this feeling is coming from but I only get that impression when I use these heavy IDEs.
Say I want my development environment / settings / workspace config to be easily replicated and configured when someone new joins the project, will their Jetbrains IDE recognize it and prompt the user to adapt? Because that is one thing I enjoy with vscode, EVERYTHING is under my control and I can see what everything does. The buttons that runs different tasks can easily be viewed on .vscode/tasks.json, all config is within the .vscode folder!
In Jetbrains IDEs, some things are local only and you have to ask the peers to screenshare which config they had. I don't want that, I want the whole workspace to be easily replicated and shared.
I know Jetbrains is working on Fleet, I've been trying it out a couple of times and I like it, I hope they take this into their consideration.
by William_BB on 5/7/25, 2:00 PM
I know CLion also has clangd, but I believe it's their own fork. I am also not sure if you can enable all clangd features since it's not the main engine. I'd be happy to hear people's thoughts about this.
by shortrounddev2 on 5/7/25, 12:58 PM
by iainctduncan on 5/7/25, 3:02 PM
by mcflubbins on 5/7/25, 4:56 PM
I have my work PC which I leave on pretty much 24/7 and if I forget to close RustRover, and try to launch it on my desktop (for personal project, or to just work from another room) I get an error that I already have a licensed copy running and it closes RustRover. Sometimes I wake my Laptop from sleep and it does this because I still had an old window open. Really unnecessary...
by 90s_dev on 5/7/25, 3:39 PM
by videogreg93 on 5/7/25, 1:08 PM
by bayindirh on 5/7/25, 12:50 PM
Like it or not, C++ is not going anywhere in the short and long term, so it's always good to have real IDEs around (CLion, Eclipse CDT, etc.) which can integrate with good instrumentation and give real time feedback on your code.
by giancarlostoro on 5/7/25, 5:49 PM
I would love to see them build a fully native editor with their decades of knowledge.
by ferguess_k on 5/7/25, 3:38 PM
I'm using VSCode with a manually written Makefile, and all of my debugging lives in gdb tui mode in a separate terminal. I do prefer a better UI though, but right now it's fine.
One concern is that Jetbriain IDEs usually takes a lot of memory. I do have a 16GB laptop though, so should be fine.
by DidYaWipe on 5/8/25, 3:41 AM
Can anyone weigh in on WebStorm vs. VS Code for JS/TS development? I'm developing a back end with Deno running locally, and VS Code has been decent for debugging and using the language runtime. Would WebStorm offer any advantages?
by OrvalWintermute on 5/7/25, 3:48 PM
by gh0stcat on 5/7/25, 4:37 PM
by chpatrick on 5/7/25, 4:51 PM
by WhereIsTheTruth on 5/7/25, 12:54 PM
by andrewstuart on 5/7/25, 5:34 PM
by zoobab on 5/7/25, 1:44 PM
by Artoooooor on 5/7/25, 6:10 PM
by hiatus on 5/7/25, 5:06 PM
by andy_ppp on 5/7/25, 12:53 PM
by Xss3 on 5/7/25, 8:35 PM
by ixmerof on 5/8/25, 10:29 AM
by DemetriousJones on 5/7/25, 12:52 PM
by globalnode on 5/7/25, 2:59 PM
by subzero06 on 5/7/25, 1:36 PM