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Comment by rethab | Hacker News Reader

I like the jetbrains products a lot and have been using IntelliJ as my main IDE for years.

What I don’t like is their pricing with regards to multiple products. I use IntelliJ 95% of the time and pay for it. Sometimes, I’m writing some Python or C and would like to have a decent IDE as well, but then I immediately need to purchase the „all products pack“. I wish there was a cheaper option for occasional use of other IDEs. Right now I use the PyCharm community edition, but this feels a bit silly :)

Hopefully Fleet will solve this.

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I’m baffled by this. Many folks spend thousands on hardware. JetBrains makes such exceptional tools, I don’t understand how a few hundred bucks for the complete product pack is unreasonable (with understandable exceptions for folks with limited income). This stuff isn’t free, it surprises me when fellow engineers are averse towards paying for great software that helps us build software.

The price is so crazy cheap I don't get it. I pay $173/yr for the all products pack ($289 first year, $231 second year, $173 year 3+) and it's some of the best value/ROI.

Even if I though VSC was on the same level (I don't) the configuration and plugin management hell alone is worth $173/yr (No, I don't want to hear about how easy you think it is). If you're using it professionally then $173/yr is nothing, hell, I'd probably pay $300/yr and not gripe because again, I get so much value out of these tools. We are talking about a tiny fraction of a percentage of the income I make while using these tools.

The configuration management in JetBrains' products is far worse than in VSC. On the JetBrains side we have a configuration system based on a tree of XML files, some of which contain system-specific configuration and should not be checked in to version control (sometimes in the same file as shared configuration!). On the VSC side we have a handful of json files where system-specific configuration can be stored in the user's home directory, allowing for easy version control of shared configuration. What killer configuration management feature do JetBrains' products offer that outweighs the aforementioned flaws?

I don’t have to deal with JSON. It’s really that simple.

I’ve got better things to do than read every plugin’s docs for how they want to do something and hope it’s all up to date. Just give me a UI to configure it.

Okay, fine, I don’t disagree. Your complaints are warranted. VSCode is better, Xcode (imo) is worse.

>What killer configuration management feature do JetBrains' products offer that outweighs the aforementioned flaws?

I don’t know your use-case, but I’m sure that their products could support it if you spent a few minutes reading documentation.

Yes, it ain’t JSON, but it’s not “awful” either imo.

FWIW, one neat pattern is binding a nix file for setting up your developer environment with all the tools, scripts, etc. you need. You can even have nix bring in jetbrains products (pinned to a particular version) so the team is all squared away.

You can use Python plugin for Idea. It's essentially the same as PyCharm, at least theoretically.

No way to use C or C#, though. Those languages are outliers for some reason.

> then I immediately need to purchase the „all products pack“.

Most languages are available in IntelliJ via Plugins rather than needing to download the separate language specific product.

IntelliJ Ultimate has all the plugins ("other IDEs"). So you could purchase that one time, and use the fallback version for smaller tasks. Granted, it might not have the latest features.

It doesn't have them all, for example C.

is Fleet still being developed? I had a feeling it was dead given that Jetbrains has been pretty mum about it since the announcement couple years ago

They’re still building it. There was a new version 3 days ago.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/fleet/2024/05/fleet-1-35-is-out-i...

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