This doesn’t paper over deprecating the Rust plugin and stealing contributions. I used to be a huge JetBrains fan and now I pull this out every time. Anything but.
It looks like they deprecated that one so they can sell the Rust plug-in for CLion. Granted RustRover is free for non-commercial use.
Stuff like this is why I don’t mess with paid IDEs and editors.
Tbh rust-analyzer is still pretty great. What bothers me more is that Kotlin is pretty much the only language without an official language server, because it doesn’t align with their business interests…
And now the IntelliJ plugin isn’t included in the all products pack for some reason.
Edit: It looks like it actually is included, or is supposed to be.
Oh my God. That’s awful.
Thanks for posting about jet brains coopting and closing the rust plug-in. Yuck!
Don’t need to go all the way there. I always heard that jetbrains make the best editors. Yet when my job forced everyone to use CLion I saw that it was just a lie. The editors aren’t good, they are just expensive.
There are 2 easy examples:
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Remote developing sucks. Loading a remote cmake project takes ages. Yet if you remove the temp directory it’s almost instantaneous. Except when you do it too often and clion refuses to sync the files, then you’re fucked because there isn’t a “sync” button, it only happens automatically.
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The commit log is awful. It doesn’t by default show you the commit/branch you’ve checked out, it shows the chronologically most recent commit. There’s no “go to checked out commit” button either, you have to write the hash in the search field. Which btw the search is trash. If you write 6 of the characters of the hash it shows “there are no results”, yet when you write the 7th, suddenly your commit appears.
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VSCode & VSCodium are also free for commercial use.
Why learn an IDE you won’t use anywhere else?
C# Devkit will do in a pinch but it’s still second class in VS Code compared to languages like TypeScript.
Since MS killed off MonoDevelop and Visual Studio is Windows only, it’ll be good to finally have a free proper C# IDE again on Linux.
Why would you use a library or framework when you can code everything from scratch? It probably depends on how good the VSCode extension is vs how bad the IDE is.
For the languages I have tried (mostly GoLang plus a bit of Terraform/Terragrunt), VSCode plugins can do code highlighting, can highlight syntax and lint errors, can navigate to a methods implementation, the auto-complete seems to pick random words from the code base, and can find the callers for a method. It is good enough for every day use.
IDEs I have used (Eclipse for Java, PyCharm, InteliJ for Kotlin) offer more. They all have starter templates for common file types. The auto-complete is much more syntax aware and can sometimes guess what variables I intend to pass in as arguments. There is refactoring which can correctly find other usages of a variable and can make trivial code rewrites. There are generators for boilerplate methods. They all have a built in graphical debugger and a test runner.
There’s also Zed. It’s still pretty new and barebones but I like it a lot more than Code or anything else.
same here, i was using RustRover before that and it was slow on my laptop, i also had to create an account to use it. Zed is pretty much plug n play
I am kind of using intellij ideas for everything. They are just so much better.
I don’t think I would want to work for an employer that is too cheap for an IDE license
They’re really not. As much as I hate commercial licensing for any dev tools, if you want to talk about superior there’s nothing quite as good as Visual Studio (not code) on Windows.
That’s just your opinion, and your specific use case. I do not enjoy using Visual Studio, and MS no longer makes it for the Mac (the superior developer platform (see what I did there?)). JetBrains products have their weaknesses but they are damn good.
I adore Visual Studio for how it set the gold standard for code editing. VsCode is growing rapidly, but Visual Studio set an incredibly high bar.
For anyone reading along, Visual Studio Community Edition was free and fantastic last time I tried it, and it does 99% of anything any individual developer cares about.
The paid professional license shines for big messy enterprise stuff, but most people looking for an editor don’t need to worry about that.
All that said, disclaimer for full honesty: my tool of choice is NeoVim - often with a splash of VSCodium.
I don’t actually use VS either mostly because I prefer to use a lighter editor and the commandline. But it does set a high bar for what an IDE should be.
