> but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way
That's just not true.
I have access to the full Jetbrains suite for free, yet I still opt to use Neovim or VS Code/Codium for most languages.
Jetbrains IDEs are great in many ways, but are objectively worse on several metrics:
* slow startup times
* slow initial operations until the JIT is warmed up
* even once warm, you always eventually do something that lags or blocks the UI, maybe barely enough to consciously notice, maybe for several seconds; and it really affects user experience if you care about latency - it drives me crazy each time
* plugins: VS Code has a wide range of great plugins, many more than the Jetbrains ecosystem and especially when it comes to more niche languages or functionality, Vim/emacs but also VS Code are much more extensible in general
* keyboard warriors: the Vim plugin is fine, and you can configure the Jetbrains IDEs to do almost anything with the keyboard, but you need way more arcane knowledge in the form of memorized context-specific bindings, and you always eventually forget something and need to switch back to the mouse. Vim and emacs are just much better there. VS Code is actually also better, because the interactions are significantly more customizable.
* Wayland / tiling WM / input lag: Jetbrains products really suck on tiling window managers like i3 / sway because they use native windows for dialogs. They also don't support Wayland natively, so they run through X server emulation which hurts input lag and brings plenty of bugs like weird dialog behaviour. In general the input lag is quite bad on Linux, it seems to be much better optimized on Mac OS
There are plenty of valid reasons why you wouldn't want to use their IDEs, even if they provide more integration and superior refactoring.
I haven’t checked in a couple years, but this mirrors my experience very closely.
I pay for good editors just to support the creators. I want to pay for the one I use daily. The reality is that vscode is the most extensible, performant on average (not in all ways), and useful IDE I have.
Most of your pain points are mostly superficial. Yes, it's slow to start, but I close my projects rarely enough for that not to matter.
Yes, there are possibly more plugins for VS Code, but they are largely shit, aren't they?
Yes, LS has made it possible to create rudimentary editing capabilities for languages that always lacked them, and that is unironically a good thing. But for bigger/established languages VS Code provides maybe 10% of functionality that Jetbrains IDEs provide.
That IntelliJ exists at all is a condemnation of how bloated and generally ridiculous Java has become. I die a little inside every time I use it, but the alternatives for developing in a large Java codebase are all worse.
I'm using PyCharm in i3 daily, and it works great.
There was a bug around input focus of certain Windows once, it had an immediate work around, and Jetbrains fixed the bug in a reasonable time frame for the probably pretty small percentage of users on i3.
Jetbrains IDEs are not the greatest example for why free software is better; they actually a rare example of proprietary software working really well.
I agree with the rest of your points, but keyboard navigation in VSC just blows (or I'm doing something very wrong). It's painfully obvious main VSCode developers must be heavy mouse users because you just can't do some things there without a mouse, or they're really awkward (for example, de-focusing the sidebar requires pressing some weird key combo (I think it's Ctrl+Shift+E or something like that?), while a simple Escape works in IDEA for all similar situations — de-focus the sidebar, de-focus a search result/debugger/whatever pane, close the search dialog, basically anything that means "go back to editing the code").
I couldn't find a key combo (or any way to configure it) to navigate between classes and functions in the same file. I find this to be very useful, I must be pressing it hundreds of times a day. VSC expects you to focus on the breadcrumb pane, arrow up or down to the name of the member you'd like to jump to, and press Enter, while in IDEA you just press Alt+ArrowUp (or down) and quickly jump between functions in the same file.
Same with search results. Do a search in IDEA, press Ctrl+Enter, it moves the result list to the search pane. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Arrow(Up|Down) lets you quickly jump between them. That's another thing I just can't live without. I couldn't find anything like that in VSCode, search is so awkward to use I just drop out to the shell and use ripgrep directly.
Close to 100% of IDEA/Rider's functionality can be controlled through the keyboard, and I think the developers themselves are using it heavily, because it's configured out of the box, hotkeys are discoverable once you understand the logic behind them, and they make sense (unlike in VSCode where hotkeys for many important functions are either not assigned at all, or are awkward out of the box. For example, who in the hell decided to bind "jump to definition" to F12? I'm getting flashbacks to how we played Mortal Kombat at the beginning of the century where you were expected to quickly press difficult key sequences to perform spectacular fighting combos.)
> I couldn't find a key combo (or any way to configure it) to navigate between classes and functions in the same file.
That's an interesting use case, it totally makes sense, it's something I don't know I could have, even though I rarely use mouse. I'm just used to Ctrl+Shift+O and search for member names.
> who in the hell decided to bind "jump to definition" to F12
Well, it's "Visual Studio" Code, and Visual Studio had this keybinding for at least 20 years. I understand that it does not work for you, but there is a reason.
I grew up using zero Macs, so "go to definition" in my brain always map to "F12 as a single key, or gd in normal mode in a modal editor". Oh, and F12 is easily reachable on an US ANSI 104 keyboard.
Thanks for the pointer, this seems to work. The plugin seems to have appeared after I last checked for something like that.
Now only to make search at least quarter as good as it is in IDEA (it seems to be very underappreciated for such an important piece of functionality): jumping between results, grouping results by the class/function they appear in, filtering by access type (declaration/definition/read value/write value), etc etc.
Jump up & down has a different use case compared to symbol search (which I too use heavily). If the program is well-structured (i.e. functions are of reasonable size and things that depend on each other and call each other are located nearby), it eases the pain of trying to understand how it all ties together, especially for those with bad short-term memory like myself.
My experience with CLion was that it was agonizingly slow to do anything. It stuttered scrolling through even a small C project. I don't know exactly what it was doing in the background, but it constantly had fans running. Long after it made sense for it to be indexing.
In fairness, though, this was probably four or five years ago. But it sure colored my opinion of the software.
Randomly clicked on some of the provided links:
One was an acknowledged bug that was fixed in .1 version.
Another one doesn't specify what hardware do they have.
Like I said, stop using computers from 20 years ago and let the indexer do its thing. Since the navigation in Jetbrains products is so good it takes a while for the indexer to index everything especially in large projects.
I was just using a macbook air (with Intel 2 cores cpu) with android studio with both java and c++ code. Not a huge project but it was over 100k of code. It worked just fine. No stuttering when scrolling. I don't remember having that problem in ANY ide for the past decade, not just Jetbrains.
That's just not true.
I have access to the full Jetbrains suite for free, yet I still opt to use Neovim or VS Code/Codium for most languages.
Jetbrains IDEs are great in many ways, but are objectively worse on several metrics:
* slow startup times
* slow initial operations until the JIT is warmed up
* even once warm, you always eventually do something that lags or blocks the UI, maybe barely enough to consciously notice, maybe for several seconds; and it really affects user experience if you care about latency - it drives me crazy each time
* plugins: VS Code has a wide range of great plugins, many more than the Jetbrains ecosystem and especially when it comes to more niche languages or functionality, Vim/emacs but also VS Code are much more extensible in general
* keyboard warriors: the Vim plugin is fine, and you can configure the Jetbrains IDEs to do almost anything with the keyboard, but you need way more arcane knowledge in the form of memorized context-specific bindings, and you always eventually forget something and need to switch back to the mouse. Vim and emacs are just much better there. VS Code is actually also better, because the interactions are significantly more customizable.
* Wayland / tiling WM / input lag: Jetbrains products really suck on tiling window managers like i3 / sway because they use native windows for dialogs. They also don't support Wayland natively, so they run through X server emulation which hurts input lag and brings plenty of bugs like weird dialog behaviour. In general the input lag is quite bad on Linux, it seems to be much better optimized on Mac OS
There are plenty of valid reasons why you wouldn't want to use their IDEs, even if they provide more integration and superior refactoring.