I think the biggest benefit of this is that - if I’m not mistaken - the new UI will be compatible with Wayland (as far as I know, Fleet’s interface already is Wayland compatible). This could finally allow me to move away from X for good.
In addition to fractional scaling, it modernizes and simplifies the whole graphics stack in a way akin to something like Aero when whatever major version of windows did that. Features I appreciate are:
Much less tearing
HiDPI is much better, probably partly due to the fractional scaling
More secure (though I’m taking others at their word)
X development has slowed, so I’m less confident that code rot will not create stability or security issues
I think for you it wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference, unless you decide to run the Linux version of your JetBrains product using an X server to display the window (which I wouldn’t recommend considering there’s native Windows versions and their products seem to have excellent WSL support).
For a Linux user… it’s kind of a mixed bag. There’s some security benefits to Wayland, but mostly the reason I see this as a good thing is that most desktop environment seem to be moving X into maintenance mode, and doing all new interesting development exclusively on Wayland. Gesture support and fractional scaling come to mind.
I use IDEA every day at work and it’s such a pain to set up a new SDK/venv in every project. I loved that I could just configure it statically in the project in vscode, but they took that behavior away and broke it horribly in multi-workspace projects.
Nah, this one is specific to a vscode feature where you could specify a path to a venv for your project / workspace and then they removed it in favor of their own heuristic for automatically detecting venvs but it doesn’t work for multi-root workspaces and then shut down all criticism about that fact.
I’m angry about it because I’ve been dealing with a poor workflow for the past ~2 years since that happened. Thankfully I do less Python development these days.
Can I ask a stupid question? Why would one ever want multi-root workspaces? Sounds like a recipe for disaster, at least for me :) I HATE that these are so common at work.
Times I have been instrumenting/debugging THE WRONG BLOCK OF CODE: About 6 billion :)
In my use-case? Fullstack apps that live in the same repo. It allows me to create a view of the different sources in one cohesive place and for their tooling to be separate. I’ll plop a .code-workspace file there and colleagues get the same exact experience on any PC down to the extensions used.
It picks up poetry automatically now. If your project has pyproject.toml file at the top level, it just works. I was contemplating moving all my stuff to poetry when they introduced that feature. That sealed the deal for me.
My children run ThinkPad X250s; the two eldest recently started coding, using GameMaker Studio. I had to buy them external monitors; the IDEs were literally unusable on 12” screens.
However, I’ve used Emacs without any issues for years on a 12” X220.
One of the reasons I dislike Visual Studio so much is that it crams so many window panes and tabs and buttons and toolbars and other crap in the way that I can hardly focus on writing code.
When I’m working in the garage, I don’t take out every tool I own and put them in front of me while I work on my bike. I only take out the tools I’m using at that time. An IDE should be the same - I don’t need to see every piece of information about everything and have hundreds of tools (button) visible - just show me the ones I’m using at that moment.
Have you ever tried hiding stuff? Basically every single thing can be stowed away. The fact of the matter is that you’re not familiar with your own garage. The whole thing is customizeable to the teeth.
Presumably intentionally so; VSCode w/ language-server driven intellisense has taken over the editor market in a big way, and I gather they’re trying to make the sales pitch of “pay us money for our product instead” a little easier by softening the UI changes for anyone who they can convince to switch.
Not ideal for people who love the current JetBrains IDE UI paradigm, I suppose.
I feel like that goes both ways though. If there’s less difference, why am I paying?
I am not an absolutionist in terms of redesigns, but as someone who likes using Jetbrains software for working in Enterprise Software, moving towards this “you can barely have two files open at once” design makes me a bit sad (I’m 100% sure I can mess around with the configuration/layout to get what I want of course)
I feel like that goes both ways though. If there’s less difference, why am I paying?
I mean it’s hard to say (I’m neither a vscode nor much of a jetbrains guy), but in my limited experience with CLion I walked away with the impression that one buys it for the features (some of which are advantages over rust-analyzer), and merely tolerates the UI. Not that there’s anything completely wrong with the UI, but the current mostly bog-standard “bag of icons” IDE paradigm can’t really be selling many licenses on its strength alone, can it?
“We’ve got these features but a UI familiar to you” is probably an easier sell than “we’ve got these features and a UI familiar to a VB6 dev” to the newer generation of JS/python/Ruby/Go devs they’re increasingly trying to target, who’ve mostly come up on the textmate/sublime/atom/vscode evolution of editors, is my basic read. The Visual Studio proper / Eclipse school of IDE design is probably slowly going away as it’s becoming increasingly unfamiliar to younger devs.
For me, the biggest value of JetBrains is their unified framework for parsing and manipulating code, which allows for a reasonably consistent experience across languages in their IDEs. For single-language usage, I‘m not that sure.
I feel like that goes both ways though. If there’s less difference, why am I paying?
I’ve jumped around between a number of editors and IDEs for the last.. decade and a half.. I’ve never seen one that is both cross platform, and has the same level of code intelligence as IDEA/derivatives.
I’m not talking about basic auto-complete of function/method names/parameters.
If your codebase is typed (even e.g php runtime typing works), IDEA can make refactoring code a lot less tedious.
Rename a method? Add a non-optional argument? Move a method to a different class? Move a class to a different namespace? Rename an entire namespace? Consolidate hard coded strings into constants? Inline functions/methods, variable/const references, etc? Yep yep yep yep yep. And that’s just considering “regular” languages. Want to hook up a connection to an SQL DB and write raw queries against it? No worries, it’ll give you code intel against the DB schema on-the-fly.
Personally, it doesn’t help that the current crop of popular non-IDE “editors” are basically all electron based - if I’m going to need a couple of gig of memory just for the IDE, I damn well want it to do more than be a glorified text editor in a web view.
This is part of why I’m quite looking forward to Fleet - sometimes I don’t need all that refactoring support (i.e. writing markdown docs) and a lightweight mode would be nice, and the ability to have cross-arch workflows (i.e. run fleet backend on an intel machine for some particular project, use an arm machine as my workstation) will be quite interesting too.
I wonder if this is a backport of refactoring work done for Fleet. I kind of got the impression they were planning on eventually migrating all their editors’ features to Fleet so it could replace them all.
The Inter font is used for the UI on all supported OSs. It is a robust and well-developed UI font which is already used in several JetBrains products, like Toolbox and Space.
Previously, default OS fonts were used on each of the platforms. These fonts are quite different, so additional design and development was required to make sure the UI was rendered correctly on each of the platforms.
This is why we can’t have nice things, AKA, cross platform UI is kinda impossible. :P
You are correct! Though I suspect if you asked developers whether they’d prefer their IDE’s UI to fit the host OS, or to be consistent across OS’s, you’d start a great flame war.
I like the changes, but this feels like the end of an era. IDEs have mostly looked and worked the same since I used VB 5.0 back in the 90s, so it’s a little bittersweet!
Jetbrains needed to fire their UI team years ago when they proudly wrote that one blog post about how they made every icon look the same and monochrome. They obviously don’t understand anything about their end users, humans, and how brains and eyes work.
IntelliJ has been unusable without themeing plugins since then, and seeing how one of my coworkers is doing perfectly fine with Eclipse, I always thought it’ll be my first choice to try out when the Jetbrains design team forces their next abomination upon me. Looks like the time has come.
Agreed, iconography has regressed so much to a point where people have no idea what its purpose is. Remember FamFamFam icons [1], circa 2005? I think humanity peaked at this time. Few designers have conviction of their own anymore.
I really enjoy the icons of Haiku, and the colours… why do we have to live in a world without colour, we have a palette of at least 16M nowadays, and even more with HDR displays…
It puts a smile on my face whenever I spot Silk/Mini icons being used online. They’ve been around long enough that they sort of just blend into the background of the internet. Big thank you to Mark James for keeping the site around, it’s like a time capsule now.
I think the biggest benefit of this is that - if I’m not mistaken - the new UI will be compatible with Wayland (as far as I know, Fleet’s interface already is Wayland compatible). This could finally allow me to move away from X for good.
Fleet doesn’t seem to run natively on Wayland, at least not by default.
Note the issue isn’t just running in a Wayland environment, which IDEA already does, but running natively as a Wayland client (ie, no XWayland).
Oh, weird, I had read somewhere that Fleet’s interface was based on Skia and that it’d be Wayland ready by simply switching the backend.
As a Windows user, what does this functionally mean? I only ever interact with Linux through a terminal.
In addition to fractional scaling, it modernizes and simplifies the whole graphics stack in a way akin to something like Aero when whatever major version of windows did that. Features I appreciate are:
I think for you it wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference, unless you decide to run the Linux version of your JetBrains product using an X server to display the window (which I wouldn’t recommend considering there’s native Windows versions and their products seem to have excellent WSL support).
For a Linux user… it’s kind of a mixed bag. There’s some security benefits to Wayland, but mostly the reason I see this as a good thing is that most desktop environment seem to be moving X into maintenance mode, and doing all new interesting development exclusively on Wayland. Gesture support and fractional scaling come to mind.
In practical sense fractional scaling doesn’t really work for X11 while it’s OK on Wayland.
My heart sank when I read the title. So many good products have been ruined by a redesign. Who knows, maybe I’ll be surprised
Yeah, me too. The product work fine for me right now, I have absolutely no need for this.
But we’ll see.
These are really nice looking changes.
I love Pycharm but I feel like it’s increasingly getting its lunch eaten by Visual Studio Code because it’s still just a bit cumbersome to set up.
I really love the current PyCharm. I’m seriously concerned that this change will move things I use to where I can’t find/use them.
PyCharm + django + django extensions prompt has been so insanely good for me lately, I’ll be super upset if they wreck it for a redesign.
I use IDEA every day at work and it’s such a pain to set up a new SDK/venv in every project. I loved that I could just configure it statically in the project in vscode, but they took that behavior away and broke it horribly in multi-workspace projects.
The VSCode Python team is working on this FWIW. They have a thing in the works code-named “WWBD” (What Would Brent Do) - it’s an opinionated automated Python environment setup extension.
Looking forward to that!
What would Brent do? Break a perfectly functional workflow without a fallback, lock the issue, and never revisit it again.
Are we still bitter about the dead batteries PEP? :)
Nah, this one is specific to a vscode feature where you could specify a path to a venv for your project / workspace and then they removed it in favor of their own heuristic for automatically detecting venvs but it doesn’t work for multi-root workspaces and then shut down all criticism about that fact.
I’m angry about it because I’ve been dealing with a poor workflow for the past ~2 years since that happened. Thankfully I do less Python development these days.
Can I ask a stupid question? Why would one ever want multi-root workspaces? Sounds like a recipe for disaster, at least for me :) I HATE that these are so common at work.
Times I have been instrumenting/debugging THE WRONG BLOCK OF CODE: About 6 billion :)
In my use-case? Fullstack apps that live in the same repo. It allows me to create a view of the different sources in one cohesive place and for their tooling to be separate. I’ll plop a
.code-workspacefile there and colleagues get the same exact experience on any PC down to the extensions used.Interesting! I couldn’t handle it but I totally get it :) I think I’d prefer separate repos and separate vscode windows :)
It picks up poetry automatically now. If your project has
pyproject.tomlfile at the top level, it just works. I was contemplating moving all my stuff to poetry when they introduced that feature. That sealed the deal for me.Great, just what we need: more negative space everywhere. Not happy with this. IDE’s should be extremely dense and the current design is just fine.
My children run ThinkPad X250s; the two eldest recently started coding, using GameMaker Studio. I had to buy them external monitors; the IDEs were literally unusable on 12” screens.
However, I’ve used Emacs without any issues for years on a 12” X220.
Completely disagree with you on that.
One of the reasons I dislike Visual Studio so much is that it crams so many window panes and tabs and buttons and toolbars and other crap in the way that I can hardly focus on writing code.
When I’m working in the garage, I don’t take out every tool I own and put them in front of me while I work on my bike. I only take out the tools I’m using at that time. An IDE should be the same - I don’t need to see every piece of information about everything and have hundreds of tools (button) visible - just show me the ones I’m using at that moment.
Have you ever tried hiding stuff? Basically every single thing can be stowed away. The fact of the matter is that you’re not familiar with your own garage. The whole thing is customizeable to the teeth.
:( this looks too much like vs code to me
Presumably intentionally so; VSCode w/ language-server driven intellisense has taken over the editor market in a big way, and I gather they’re trying to make the sales pitch of “pay us money for our product instead” a little easier by softening the UI changes for anyone who they can convince to switch.
Not ideal for people who love the current JetBrains IDE UI paradigm, I suppose.
I feel like that goes both ways though. If there’s less difference, why am I paying?
I am not an absolutionist in terms of redesigns, but as someone who likes using Jetbrains software for working in Enterprise Software, moving towards this “you can barely have two files open at once” design makes me a bit sad (I’m 100% sure I can mess around with the configuration/layout to get what I want of course)
I mean it’s hard to say (I’m neither a vscode nor much of a jetbrains guy), but in my limited experience with CLion I walked away with the impression that one buys it for the features (some of which are advantages over rust-analyzer), and merely tolerates the UI. Not that there’s anything completely wrong with the UI, but the current mostly bog-standard “bag of icons” IDE paradigm can’t really be selling many licenses on its strength alone, can it?
“We’ve got these features but a UI familiar to you” is probably an easier sell than “we’ve got these features and a UI familiar to a VB6 dev” to the newer generation of JS/python/Ruby/Go devs they’re increasingly trying to target, who’ve mostly come up on the textmate/sublime/atom/vscode evolution of editors, is my basic read. The Visual Studio proper / Eclipse school of IDE design is probably slowly going away as it’s becoming increasingly unfamiliar to younger devs.
For me, the biggest value of JetBrains is their unified framework for parsing and manipulating code, which allows for a reasonably consistent experience across languages in their IDEs. For single-language usage, I‘m not that sure.
I’ve jumped around between a number of editors and IDEs for the last.. decade and a half.. I’ve never seen one that is both cross platform, and has the same level of code intelligence as IDEA/derivatives.
I’m not talking about basic auto-complete of function/method names/parameters.
If your codebase is typed (even e.g php runtime typing works), IDEA can make refactoring code a lot less tedious.
Rename a method? Add a non-optional argument? Move a method to a different class? Move a class to a different namespace? Rename an entire namespace? Consolidate hard coded strings into constants? Inline functions/methods, variable/const references, etc? Yep yep yep yep yep. And that’s just considering “regular” languages. Want to hook up a connection to an SQL DB and write raw queries against it? No worries, it’ll give you code intel against the DB schema on-the-fly.
Personally, it doesn’t help that the current crop of popular non-IDE “editors” are basically all electron based - if I’m going to need a couple of gig of memory just for the IDE, I damn well want it to do more than be a glorified text editor in a web view.
This is part of why I’m quite looking forward to Fleet - sometimes I don’t need all that refactoring support (i.e. writing markdown docs) and a lightweight mode would be nice, and the ability to have cross-arch workflows (i.e. run fleet backend on an intel machine for some particular project, use an arm machine as my workstation) will be quite interesting too.
I wonder if this is a backport of refactoring work done for Fleet. I kind of got the impression they were planning on eventually migrating all their editors’ features to Fleet so it could replace them all.
https://www.jetbrains.com/fleet/
While we’re making UI design changes, can we please evict the lawyers from the design meetings as well?
I love it! The move towards less overt chrome is really good positioning for their brand IMO.
This is why we can’t have nice things, AKA, cross platform UI is kinda impossible. :P
It’s also silly.
Yes, additional work is required to “make sure the UI was rendered correctly on each of the platforms” — but it is your work.
You are correct! Though I suspect if you asked developers whether they’d prefer their IDE’s UI to fit the host OS, or to be consistent across OS’s, you’d start a great flame war.
I like the changes, but this feels like the end of an era. IDEs have mostly looked and worked the same since I used VB 5.0 back in the 90s, so it’s a little bittersweet!
Their website is so slow it feels like Java.
Jetbrains needed to fire their UI team years ago when they proudly wrote that one blog post about how they made every icon look the same and monochrome. They obviously don’t understand anything about their end users, humans, and how brains and eyes work. IntelliJ has been unusable without themeing plugins since then, and seeing how one of my coworkers is doing perfectly fine with Eclipse, I always thought it’ll be my first choice to try out when the Jetbrains design team forces their next abomination upon me. Looks like the time has come.
Agreed, iconography has regressed so much to a point where people have no idea what its purpose is. Remember FamFamFam icons [1], circa 2005? I think humanity peaked at this time. Few designers have conviction of their own anymore.
[1] http://www.famfamfam.com/
I see a ranty blog post in my future :-).
I really enjoy the icons of Haiku, and the colours… why do we have to live in a world without colour, we have a palette of at least 16M nowadays, and even more with HDR displays…
I didn’t know what those icons were called. Very nostalgic nowadays to me, although they still look great!
It puts a smile on my face whenever I spot Silk/Mini icons being used online. They’ve been around long enough that they sort of just blend into the background of the internet. Big thank you to Mark James for keeping the site around, it’s like a time capsule now.
It does look nice, aesthetically. But does it feel nice when used, is what I’m concerned about.
I suppose this is not publicly available for testing yet?