Hacker News Reader

Comment by JanezStupar | Hacker News Reader

If you prefer the good ol' plugin model then you can buy IntellijIDEA and install all the language/platform specific plugins that you want.

One catch is that IntellijIDEA license costs about 2x the price of specialized IDE for your favourite platform.

The other catch is that JetBrains has individual teams for individual IDEs and thus IndellijIDEA plugins lag a bit behind the specialized solutions.

No need to get all worked up.

View on HN

The plugins are not the same as the IDEs. For example PyCharm doesn't distinguish between project settings and IDE settings the way IntelliJ does. The UI for choosing your python version and virtualenv is baked right into the IDE settings where as that is not the case when you install the Python plugin in IntelliJ. The .idea directories also do not seem to be compatible across RubyMine and IntelliJ. I have mistakenly opened up the wrong project with RubyMine and it scrambled the .idea for a non-ruby project.

The same is true with WebStorm, the UI and features found in WebStorm are not the same as in the JavaScript plugin. You cannot buy IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate and get all the features of all the other IDEs, you need to have separate licenses.

Indeed. Working with a Python (Django) project in IntelliJ IDEA is downright annoying: project setup is hard, and the Java stuff haunts you everywhere. While it's better than plain old Notepad, I can't recommend it for anything but the odd side project.

Another annoyance is they do not offer the database functionality in IntelliJ on WebStorm. The database plugins that can be installed on WebStorm are geared towards MySQL and Oracle. I use Postgres.

I wonder if it's worth trying to crowd fund a JavaScript IDE based on atom.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com