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Comment by CraigJPerry | Hacker News Reader

The new Jetbrains ui is hard to like. It’s form over function. The old ui (thankfully still available). Having to hover over a hamburger button just to cause it to draw the menu bar options then slide the mouse across to what you want is annoying.

The new commit window alt+0 is better, the old modal always felt tacked on when everything else is a docked panel.

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I tried it. The first week I shared your opinion. But then something flipped. I configured and learned hotkeys to hide the file/services/... pane and ended up with something I can only describe as 'calm'. Only 1 or 2 panes of code visible, and all functions hidden but available.

The main detractor is indeed the hamburger menu. Vscode had ctrl-p, emacs has alt-x, and both provide a way to search for some function to execude. I hope Jetbrains is hiding something similar in its innnards, but haven't found it yet. Ctrl ctrl isn't it, at least for me.

I went all-in on Jetbrains Ultimate last year without regrets. The thing is great and powerfull, but it is hard to find what you need in there, and hard to find out what is the purpose of some functionality. I've actually lost usefull functionality: Something usefull but I don't remember the name and can't find it in the menus. I should spend some time spellunking in there. Even so, I hope they find something better than the hamburger or the zillion hotkeys.

Jetbrains has Double Shift and Ctrl+Shift+A.

Thanks, all of you.

I played with it, meanwhile, and it's not really 'it'. E.g. settings gives me 4 different options, all doing different things.

emacs and vscode treat this function as a primary entry to the functionality, and have tuned the names and namespacing to this kind of usage. E.g. vscode has micropython:configure project.

This is a search function for the existing gui with reuse of existing names. As the surrounding context is lost, it is hard to say what a name means.

I like the new UI as well. There's always a learning curve, but after using it for months I haven't found any reason to switch back.

ctrl+ctrl is "run anything" (I tend to use ctrl+alt+r for the different but similar run menu instead).

I think what you want is "Actions" - which is default to "shift shift" and then click on a tab, or (ctrl/cmd)+shift+a to jump directly to that tab.

Interestingly in the JetBrains emacs keybindings set, alt-x does exactly what you want. So, it's bindable, and you can use it in ANY keybinding, emacs or not.

Ctrl-Shift-A, or something. There is a dialog with universal search for actions, files, classes....

With time, you start using the menu very rarely, because keyboard shortcuts are so much faster. No menu bar means more screen space when working on a laptop.

I usually switch off the menu bar in Emacs, and I don't even know if it can be turned on in Vim.

Ahh I’d disagree with that, I’ve been solely IntelliJ since around 2011/2012[1] and all the alt+N tool windows, the ctrl+shift+a (besides being the original feature, it’s faster than shift+shift and I never have confusion about whether I’m looking for an action or a file or … that shift+shift view just never made sense to me). Basically all the core shortcuts are memory muscle at this point but the menu is useful for browsing lesser used features. Ctrl+shift+a is slow enough at redrawing that you don’t want to be using it to search / try to remember the name of a feature.

[1] well except for a brief 2 year VSCode spell but i came back a year or so ago and have restored my all products subscription

> The new Jetbrains ui is hard to like. It’s form over function.

I'd like my JetBrains IDEs better with a 10x speedup. The new redesign isn't bad if you memorize keyboard shortcuts :-)

> The new redesign isn't bad if you memorize keyboard shortcuts :-)

Contradictio in terminis

You can use the keyboard shortcut with old UI.

I still like at the old UI.

When you do overlapping windows, those non standard chrome are great distraction.

> You can use the keyboard shortcut with old UI

That's the joke :-)

The old ui was much more compact (even compared to compact mode on new ui) and maximised real estate for code over ui elements, which is what you want from a coding editor. It's definitely form over function here and yet another regressive move in the steps Jetbrains seems to be taking of late.

FYI, it's possible to make the menu bar always visible in settings.

Aha, I’ve just turned this on, I’m going to give new ui a whirl again.

FYI you can configure old UI to not show modal dialog for commit. Took me too long to learn this and this is how I use it now. I despise the new UI. Every tool don't have to become another popular tool (vscode). I find the new UI harder to use.

I like all the buttons and menus etc visible right there without needing extra clicks. When working with colleagues I can see them struggling to find features that I have been using with old UI for my advantage because it's all out there in front of you and they don't even it's possible.

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