Comment by _virtu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _virtu | Hacker News Reader

No matter how hard I try, I can't get away from JetBrains. I've been grandfathered into their original pricing for the toolbox, so that makes it even harder. I have a plugin I've written for VS Code that was part experiment to see if I would have good uptake into the editor and part as a way for me to learn how to contribute to the plugin ecosystem. VS Code just isn't fast enough on medium to large projects. And it's never felt as much of an ide in comparison to JetBrains tooling.

I love the JetBrains toolbox. Webstorm is wonderful for all things frontend and I've heavily used Intellij for Elixir development. The level of polish for this tooling is ridiculous and I would recommend anyone who hasn't given their work a shot to go out and try one of their editors for your language of choice.

Things I can't live without in the JetBrains ecosystem

- VCS integration

  - Hands down the best integration in comparison to GitLens or any other plugins I've used for VCS in other editors and it's built right in.

- Local history

  - This has saved my ass a few times over. It's amazing how far you can go back. And yes I know what version control is.

- Refactoring

  - It's just worlds better in comparison to what VS Code/Atom/Sublime/Eclipse/NVIM offer.

- Language support

  - The number of well written plugins out there makes the VS Code ecosystem pale in comparison.

- IdeaVim

Things I wish were a bit easier in the JetBrains ecosystem

- Sharing configs

  - I love VS Code's philosophy of making all configs accessible/shareable as json.

Nice job to the JetBrains team. Seriously, you've made a fanatic out of me.

I'm also a huge fan of JetBrains products and how they work together. It's at the point where I'm thinking of slogans for them, like 'At JetBrains, the E in IDE stands for experience'... or maybe 'ecosystem' (needs work). Several times I've realized I could use a tool for X, and found it's already a feature they've already created.

One more great thing to add to the pile:

- Teamcity, the only CI/CD software doing actual 'configuration as code' using kotlin. Others (that I know of: jenkins, github action, gitlab) use an arcane-DSL-backed yaml file and call that 'code'. I'm not sure why copy-pasting plaintext files that throw away most the benefits of using code and IDE's have taken the software world by storm. They've become the standard API, or even UI in some cases, and it's just slow/unabstractable/non-extensible. I'm glad JetBrains has not jumped on that bandwagon and continue to focus on making a streamlined end-to-end dev experience and cater to the coders within.

Jenkins has a Groovy DSL for several years. YAML support came much later.

> Hands down the best integration

I don't see how you're able to use it. This is one of the few intellij features I avoid. Doing anything other than most common tasks is either difficult or impossible. Using git cli is generally better, and it doesn't make me wait 10 secs.

The diff window is pretty cool though.

I think a big part of it is that they're a company that specializes in making IDEs, using the IDEs they make. They're their own target demographic.

There are two major issues for me with IdeaVim (although I still use it heavily): no support for language-specific maps and no way to work with arbitrary actions. I can work around both of these by using a scripting host and writing kotlin/clojure to deal with the actions I care about, but it's a bunch of work.

if you work with databases, try DataGrip. it's pretty sweet.

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