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Discussion on: An Honest Comparison of VS Code vs JetBrains - 5 Points

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codenameone profile image
Shai Almog

Very detailed review. Well done!

JetBrains community is 100% free/open source and has most of the functionality people need. Like you I pay for Ultimate. I think it's worth it for professional coders.

I think Fleet will bring some of the nice ideas in VSCode and unify it with the power of JetBrains. I'm on the internal beta and it looks very good.

About plugins. I worked on plugins for both platforms and they each have their pain points. But in the end I have to say IntelliJ is still way ahead. I can literally inject functionality directly into the editor window and insert inlays within the code. It's a very deep integration with clear migration paths. The level of support we have on the slack channel for plugin developers is amazing. I worked with many tooling companies and JetBrains is fantastic.

The one downside in JetBrains is using Swing (which will be solved with Fleet). I like Swing but it's old by now.

VSCode OTOH was very painful. We ended up discarding some features. Even basic UI stuff wasn't available so we had to use an HTML view for almost everything. The problem with that approach is that you can't place it anywhere you want and you need to communicate with the main plugin via messages. It's very inconvenient and made our code overly cumbersome. The advantage is that it looks pretty because we can just outsource some of the work to a react/frontend person who is great with CSS. The resulting plugin looks great even though it doesn't have some key features of the JetBrains plugin.

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azlan_syed profile image
Azlan-Syed

really ? jetbrains is not totally free

vscode is free open source and easy to use not like pycharm or any jetbrain ide which need nearly too much of wizard to start programming and 4 gbram will die instantly if you run any jetbrain ide

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codenameone profile image
Shai Almog

Nope. Notice on the right side you can see a free download of the community version. This is the source code of IntelliJ which is the basis of pycharm: github.com/JetBrains/intellij-comm...

Easy to use is subjective. I find JetBrains far more intuitive. Features I want are in the menus, I don't need to search commands for everything. Stuff "just works".

I suggest getting your game up in both IDEs rather than being dogmatic. I used VSCode a lot, wrote plugins for it etc. I prefer JetBrains but can work with VSCode just as well.

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dansvel profile image
dan

you mean IDEA? is it for Java, Kotlin, Groovy, Scala,,?

for web development like HTML, CSS, JS you need ultimate of course,, community version not really support them,,

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codenameone profile image
Shai Almog

Yes, that's correct. Notice that it's still the same project so the core is open source. The language specific permutations are proprietary. Some are free for use at some levels (e.g. PyCharm) but AFAIK webstorm costs money.

When I was a student we used Turbo Pascal so I have no idea if there's free versions for students.

I think paying for professional tools is a benefit not a problem. Free tools mean no support. We pay for Ultimate and get amazing support both in the plugin development dept. as well as IDE issues. With VSCode I feel we always need to find the problem on our own.

As a plugin developer the difference is very stark. There are basic things I just can't do in VSCode. E.g. a text field with code completion. AST of the currently edited file. Complex widgets within a dialog (we had to use HTML). Ability to add a custom rendered UI directly into the source editor... All of those things are doable in JetBrains but we couldn't find a workable way to do them in VSCode.