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Comment by LoganDark | Hacker News Reader

Looks like VS Code. They copied the bad design.

Even JetBrains, which makes actual good IDEs, is copying VSCode with its new editor, Fleet...

And even the new IDEA UI (which is still opt-in, thank god - I tried it but moved back because the "old" UI is just clearly more ergonomic to me) is clearly VSCode-like.

yea, totally agree, recently pair-programming with a coworker and for a bit i thought he was using fleet or the new IntelliJ ui when instead it was just vs-code...

my guess is jetbrains sees the trend and wants to keep up, but if all the editors look the same as vs-code how do you differentiate?

I quite like the new IntelliJ UI, BUT only when combined with Material Theme UI (to which I own a perpetual license).

Lately I've been using Zed, but I'll have to switch back eventually because the Windows support is terrible (I know, I know, it was designed for macOS).

I rather dislike that weird side ribbon thing. Some time ago I thought I'd try and build a version without it, but that wasn't as easy as I would have liked. Maybe I'll give it another go.

The side ribbon of VSCode is called the Activity Bar. You can put it on top of the sidebar (making it more like a tab bar) or disable it entirely (which makes it a lot harder to open the sidebar or change the page it's on).

It's as simple as right click it -> Activity Bar Position -> ...

Can't you use the command palette to switch views? With enough muscle memory, this is always faster than the mouse, in my experience.

You can just disable it in the settings, quite a lot easier than building a new version without it.

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