Disclaimer: I don’t work for JetBrains. I just admire what they have been doing. 😊

I’m not quite sure what your frustration is.

Is your problem that you only want free and Open Source IDE?

• IntelliJ Community is free, and even Open Source.

Is your concern that you don’t want your options limited to just one IDE?

• VSCode with a few plugins can do a really serviceable job.
• Fleet is pretty good too, but the free version will only be for non-commercial development.
• You could even use Eclipse
  • Although, for the life of me, I don’t know why anyone would choose it over IntelliJ

Personally, I really love what JetBrains has done with their IDE’s. As a .NET developer, I used to live and die by Visual Studio, and it had its frustrations. That was where I first met JetBrains and the magic of ReSharper. Then, when developing for Android I felt the frustrated with Eclipse, and cheered when Android Studio became available.

When I started using both Kotlin and C# for development. I found JetBrains products so useful that I bought a personal subscription and convinced my company to get licenses for all interested developers…

We’ve even moved our legacy .NET development to Rider (reducing VS licenses and more than covering the cost of all the JetBrains license). Aside from a limitation on T4, templates it is much better than VS ever was (and cross platform too)!

Even Gradle has switched to Kotlin as their default DSL language.

I convinced my Fortune 500 company to allow Kotlin as an option for our dev teams, by pointing out:

• It’s Java compatible, and easy for Java devs to pick up
• No rewrites needed to start using Kotlin
  • You could mix and match with Java at any point
• It reduces boilerplate code
• It reduces overall errors and bugs (improved type safety and null safety)

We have been using Kotlin for Spring Boot and Ktor microservices in AWS for the past 3 years.

My C# .NET team was told all new development at the company had to be on the JVM. I couldn’t abide switching from C# “down” to Java, and realized Kotlin would be a more natural change for the rest of the C# devs as well.

It is now a “standard” development option for our company, and at least half a dozen teams (other than mobile) have opted for it.