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Programming

JetBrains Announces 'Fleet' IDE to Compete with Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (jetbrains.com) 98

Posted by EditorDavid from the interactive-developer-environments dept.
On Monday JetBrains (creators of the Kotlin programming language and makers of the integrated development environment IntelliJ IDEA) made an announcement: a preview for a lightweight new multi-language IDE called Fleet using IntelliJ's code-processing engine with a distributed IDE architecture and a reimagined UI.

By Friday they'd received an "overwhelming" number of requests, and announced the preview program had stopped accepting new requests. ("To subscribe for updates and the public preview announcement at jetbrains.com/fleet or follow @JetBrains_Fleet on Twitter.")

They'd received 80,000 requests in just the first 30 hours, reports Visual Studio magazine: Although JetBrains didn't even mention VS Code in its Nov. 28 announcement, many media pundits immediately characterized it along the lines of an "answer to Visual Studio Code," a "response to Visual Studio Code," a "competitor to Visual Studio Code" and so on...

"When you first launch Fleet, it starts up as a full-fledged editor that provides syntax highlighting, simple code completion, and all the things you'd expect from an editor," JetBrains said. "But wait, there's more! Fleet is also a fully functional IDE bringing smart completion, refactorings, navigation, debugging, and everything else that you're used to having in an IDE — all with a single button click."
"It starts up in an instant so you can begin working immediately..." boasts the Fleet web page, adding that Fleet "is designed to automatically detect your project configuration from the source code, maximizing the value you get from its smart code-processing engine while minimizing the need to configure the project in the IDE." And it also offers "project and context aware code completion, navigation to definitions and usages, on-the-fly code quality checks, and quick-fixes..."

Fleet also offers a collaborative environment allowing developers to work together — not just sharing the editor, but also terminals and debugging sessions. (There's even a diff view for reviewing changes.) "Others can connect to a collaboration session you initiate on your machine, or everyone can connect to a shared remote dev environment," explains Fleet's web page. "It supports a number of remote work scenarios and can be run locally on the developer's computer, in the cloud, or on a remote server," reports SD Times. (And Fleet's home page says soon it will even run in Docker containers configured with an appropriate environment for your project.)

SD Times adds that Fleet "currently supports Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, Rust, and JavaScript. The company plans to extend support to cover PHP, C++, C#, and HTML, which are the remaining languages that have IntelliJ IDEs." It's multi-platform — running on Linux, MacOS, or Windows — and Fleet's web page promises "a familiar and consistent user experience" offering one IDE for the many different technologies you might end up using.

And yes, there's a dark theme.
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JetBrains Announces 'Fleet' IDE to Compete with Microsoft's Visual Studio Code More

JetBrains Announces 'Fleet' IDE to Compete with Microsoft's Visual Studio Code

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  • The company plans to extend support to cover PHP, C++, C#, and HTML, which are the remaining languages that have IntelliJ IDEs.

    As someone who uses Rubymine every day, this hurts me deeply.

    • Ruby oddly doesn't seem to get the same love as other languages from the community at large. It's as if Ruby is primarily a CS subculture...

      I can't say why but maybe someone else could chime in with a potential explanation.

      • I hear a faint, high-pitched whine. Almost like a whistle that can only be heard by dogs.

      • Most Ruby devs use emacs or vim.

        There are also a bazillion IDEs that support it.

        • I think most would say the code completion and refactoring of JetBrain's software is the best though.

          Most languages have plenty of IDEs but overtime, we often change. I still like vim extensions for most any IDEA I use but I don't code really any project in vim.

          I am a bit surprised to imagine most RoR devs use emacs or vim though. The few I know certainly don't.

        • In the Linux camp of graybeards perhaps but its 2021 now. VS code, Atom, and jetbrains have been popular with mellenials since 2015 or so

          • Ruby is almost exclusively used by Linux/Unix users. Matz has talked about design decions being related to that.

            What is it you even wanted to say? That Ruby isn't as popular as VS code? That's an improvement! When I started with Ruby it was a great language with a great community. Then Rails happened, it got popular, and was beset upon by a combination of idiots, assholes, and people who were forced to use it and want to turn it into another language. Then that node thing came, and we were saved; the web id

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by znrt ( 2424692 )

        why should it? ruby has nothing special worth learning another language, and it doesn't add any new paradigm, perspective or philosophy. there was really no reason to create yet another interpreter and reimplement all the same usual features except for one guy wanting to do it. which is nice, kudos and all, but what's the point?

        there was never a need for ruby, and it would have barely gotten any attention at all if it hadn't found a niche with rails ... which otoh is the sort of monstrosity that makes proje

        • The guy liked Smalltalk and wanted to use it for Unix scripting. What other "reason" than want does someone need to hack on stuff and who are you to police the use of other people's personal time?

          • Offering the opinion that Ruby doesn't add value and can be safely ignored by JetBrains doesn't mean people are taken into police custody for using Ruby.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by znrt ( 2424692 )

            The guy liked Smalltalk and wanted to use it for Unix scripting.

            this could be funny but it doesn't even make sense as a caricature.

            What other "reason" than want does someone need to hack on stuff and who are you to police the use of other people's personal time?

            and you managed to utterly fail to understand what i wrote. ruby rage?

            • There was something to *understand* in your comment? Aside from the dead giveaway ("it would have barely gotten any attention at all if it hadn't found a niche with rails") that you're clearly not Japanese.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by znrt ( 2424692 )

                i'm actually very fond of japan for several reasons but i don't think nationalist pride should be a driving factor in technology adoption.

                i also laud people for doing things just for the sake of it, but that still doesn't mean those things are necessary or specially fit to solve problems in wider communities.

                i actually said as much in my post where you first somehow understood that i was "policing the use of other's time" and later understood there was "nothing to understand" at all. i sincerely hope you fe

                • It was not "nationalist pride" that drive adoption of Ruby in Japan but actually the fact that it was "specially fit to solve problems in wider communities", as you say. Namely the problems of Japanese string processing which "western" languages overlooked for obvious reasons.

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by znrt ( 2424692 )

                    what problems exactly does ruby's string processing uniquely address that "western" languages "overlook for obvious reasons"?

                    it isn't obvious at all, specially considering the existence of standard text encodings which have been broadly supported in most modern languages for a while. or did you just make that up too?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DrXym ( 126579 )
          Rake is a reason to use it - it's very useful way to produce build targets and dependencies. I'm not sure I'd want to use it for rails like programming even though it pioneered that concept.
      • Ruby was early to the MVC party with Rails, but the language is nothing special. In particular, once other dynamically typed platforms like Python and NodeJS had equivalents, those languages have enough of the same feel but are also widely used for enough other purposes that there isn't much reason to learn Ruby just for web dev.

  • What a difference that'll make (rolls eyes) (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Saturday December 04, 2021 @04:53PM (#62047633)

    "It starts up in an instant so you can begin working immediately..." boasts the Fleet web page, ...

    Pretty weak boast, as if that extra 5s (or whatever) is going to make any difference over my next 8h of coding, especially as I'm probably going to get coffee while my IDE is firing up anyway... People can be so impatient.

    • Pretty weak boast, as if that extra 5s (or whatever) is going to make any difference

      A slow start is a sign of poor design and incompetent programming.

      A basic principle of good UX design is to start up fast and give the user something to do while loading in the background.

      • A basic principle of good UX design is to start up fast and give the user something to do while loading in the background.
        That is how it works, but before all the code is loaded and indexed most of the time there is nothing productive to do, except for fetching a coffee :P

        • VS code launches in a second or 2 on my system. You all must use mechanical spinning drives and poor Windows 7 images on them or something.

          Visual studio is much slower to load in comparison

          • VS code launches in a second or 2 on my system. You all must use mechanical spinning drives and poor Windows 7 images on them or something. Visual studio is much slower to load in comparison

            Visual Studio Code doesn't come with a regalia of plugins that make development easier. Eclipse sucks to start up, but once up, I can navigate and refactor Java/Spring, SQL, and C/C++ code bases as well as JSON, Yaml, XML/XSD documents and Ant and Maven builds with an ease that Visual Studio Code cannot even come to compare.

            If I'm developing on Groovy, Python or Go, I'll fire up Visual Studio Code. Why? Because Eclipse kinda sucks in that area, so there's no reason to suffer through its slow startup time.

            • Pretty much the only thing you mentioned there that VSCode doesn't do (to my knowledge) is Ant. But that's basically because Ant is old shit that nobody bothers with anymore. You may as well complain about VSCode because it doesn't have OS/2 support.

              • Pretty much the only thing you mentioned there that VSCode doesn't do (to my knowledge) is Ant. But that's basically because Ant is old shit that nobody bothers with anymore. You may as well complain about VSCode because it doesn't have OS/2 support.

                Your knowledge is lacking.

                No. VSCode doesn't do Java or Maven to the same level out of the box as Eclipse. Try to a method pull-up refactoring, or add an indirection into a field, or take a legacy POJO and tell Eclipse to autogenerate appropriate toString() and hashCode() methods in VSCode. And VSCode is not even close to Eclipse (or IntelliJ) to remote debugging.

                I'll wait, show me.

                Or show me VSCode level of support for Maven that Eclipse (or IntelliJ) has. You can't easily navigate back and forth th

                • Oh, you're a java developer? My condolences.

                  • Oh, you're a java developer? My condolences.

                    A Java developer, and a C++ developer, and a Python developer and a Go developer, etc.

                    See, you cannot back up your claims, so you opted for ad hominem. Ok code cowboy.

                    Right there you imply you don't work in Java and thus you were in no position to question my criticism of VSCode as a Java/JEE IDE (which by the way, is an IDE I love to use for other forms of development.)

                    At this point, it is obvious that your entire reaction is emotional, simply because someone criticized an IDE. Such a juvenile thing,

                    • No, I just really don't care to spend the time to engage in IDE wars. I've written stuff in Java on occasion, using only vscode with maven, and I can't say I miss anything from eclipse. But honestly java sucks anyways. If you ever try kotlin, you'll realize just how needlessly verbose and clunky of a POS language java really is. But honestly I prefer to stay out of that whole ecosystem anyways because javas tooling AND its runtime are all dog shit.

                      Beyond that I use vscode for c#, rust, powershell, python, s

                    • See, you cannot back up your claims, so you opted for ad hominem. Ok code cowboy.

                      It was not an ad hominem, and as far as I can tell, not even an insult.

                    • No, I just really don't care to spend the time to engage in IDE wars.

                      But you just did. I simply pointed out where Eclipse was better than VSCode, and you went on your own rant, all the way giving pseudo-condolences to me for being a Java developer.

                      Everything else you are saying is just deflecting noise. Grow up and own it.

                    • No, you made a false statement, and I corrected it.

                    • because javas tooling AND its runtime are all dog shit.
                      That is wrong.

                      No idea how you come to that silly idea.

                      Java - and its VM, and the languages running on that VM - are the bleeding edge, beyond state of the art in Software Development and Language Research.

                      I agree that Java sucks with its verbosity, that is why eveyone is using Kotlin, Groovy, Scala.

                      But the eco system is sine non par.

          • VSCode launches in under a second on my Ryzen 5600x based personal computer with a Samsung 980 Pro. But my work computer is a 4 year old laptop, which has a SATA based SSD, and it takes upwards of 5-10 seconds to start VSCode. Would be nice if it loaded faster when I just want to use it to make a quick edit to a JSON file or something, so instead I end up resorting to NPP.

          • Yeah.
            And Eclipse and IntelliJ also launches in 2 seconds.

            But it is not very usable before it has indexed the project. Except for browsing and simple typing - ofc.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by epine ( 68316 )

          give the user something to do while loading in the background

          Something more productive than minesweeper?

          Is this principle oriented toward true productivity, the cult of merely looking busy, or the need for constant distraction felt by those living lives of quiet desperation?

      • Such as entertain the user with a startup screen and ominous music as in a video game?

    • Believe it or not I got into a flamewar on Neowin.net over this with Sublime text having an update.

      Yes, people still use it. I laughed and said what decade is that? Do you use Adobe Dreamweaver too? It did not go well as visual studio code was sooo slow it's electron and JavaScript so it must be unexpectedly and bloated and on his 8 year old system. After all sublime was an ide unlike vs code which is an editor so sublime has to be superior.

      Yes people refuse vs code because it's by Microsoft and it's writte

      • To be honest, I mainly use Emacs -- and have since University in the mid 80s -- and it starts up pretty fast... :-)

    • You could instead use the time to check if the licence terms have been modified without warning / recourse [ycombinator.com].

    • I think they're trying to comment on Visual Studio with this one. An IDE where you need to schedule your lunch break to coincide with it starting up is a pretty serious piece of suckage even for a company famous for its bloated crapware.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      You might be surprised. I bet a lot of people have a separate text editor set as the default app to open source code files with, not their main IDE. When they just want to browse a bit of code a simple text editor with basic syntax highlighting is all they need.

      One of the reasons why Visual Studio Code is so popular is that it can replace that editor and improve on it dramatically. Without any set-up at all you can open VSCode in the root directory of a project and it figures it all out for you. Finds the i

      • I bet a lot of people have a separate text editor set as the default app to open source code files with, not their main IDE.

        I actually use Emacs for most of my editing, and Vi for really quick stuff, and have since University in the mid 80s.

  • JetBrains Trojan horse into .... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Saturday December 04, 2021 @05:09PM (#62047667)

    ... Subscription cloud services.

    Everyone's going there and JetBrains has done the math and it's moving there too. See there latest products for details, which are all basically subscription services in disguise. I can't blame them. And if I ever should consider paying subscriptions for dev services (which I'll probably never), JetBrains certainly wouldn't be the worst choice.

    It looks interesting enough. I'll be checking it out. I use PhpStorm daily and even though it's built on Java, it's a very good IDE. If you need a professional development tool, JetBrains is a very good vendor to check out.

    • They already use subscription model for licenses. Where the software resides really doesn't matter to me.
      • Kind of. I am a JetBrains licensee.
        12 consecutive months of subscription nets you a perpetual license for the version available at the start of your licensing. It's an interesting model.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JackAxe ( 689361 )
      When JetBrains no longer offers a perpetual license fallback for their products, I will no longer update the products I use now. But as of now, I have no complaints. I bought IDEA back in 2012 and was given a free upgrade to 2015. I used that up until last month and was about to upgrade to the latest version, but then noticed that PHPStorm does everything I need in web development for less. I've been really happy working in PHPStorm. Everything I like about IDEA is in this editor.

    • Theyâ(TM)re still cheaper than Microsoft. I pay $300/year for their entire suite (having a dedicated IDE for each language is useful) vs Visual Studio Pro which quickly runs up to $6k/year and only does C-variants natively (and the non-MS variants are poorly supported).

      Besides that, the JetBrains support for Git, SQL, Docker and Vagrant right from the IDE is simply superior as Microsoft still pushes their SourceSafe (now SourceGear) and Azure garbage.

    • Subscription cloud services.

      Trojan Horse implies deception.

      Jetbrains has been pushing subscriptions for years. I have an all products pack myself. It's a good deal for good products.

      If they give you a decently functional and free version that is missing the heavyweight stuff but has great value, that's not a trojan horse. That's exactly what "community" editions of some products have been doing for many, many years.

      Yes, they would like to sell you the higher tier. Of course that. And showing me a demonstratably good one I can use is a

  • I wonder what Microsoft's response will be ? (Score:3)

    by slincolne ( 1111555 ) on Saturday December 04, 2021 @05:26PM (#62047709)
    I wonder if this will prompt them to drop the price of Visual Studio? JetBrains has been a solid product for many years, and stepping up to a platform that could compete with Visual Studio will certainly provoke a response.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hjf ( 703092 )

      This is a competitor to VSCode, not VS.

      • And it would be interesting to see them drop the price from free.

        • Perhaps they could pay me to use it?

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by kmoser ( 1469707 )
            By downloading, installing, and using it, you are "paying" by being an inadvertent perpetual beta tester for Microsoft.

          • Is VS that bad or just general MS hate? I have never used a JetBrain's product for C# but IntelliJ was great for Java.

            The worst aspect I feel with VS is updating a project to a new version. Seems like that should be automated and isn't or maybe I just haven't figured it out well enough?

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by Anonymous Coward

              Both "versions" of Visual Studio are great.

              Code is an awesome IDE for testing, writing scripts, using technologies where that type of lightweight IDE is preferred (i.e. Node dev). It seems to be the most commonly used IDE on the planet in most of those use cases; I say this because every time you look for instructions on how to do something with node or Python or similar, VSCode is always at the top of the list of instructions over other competing IDEs. Things like Atom are just as good though and come clos

            • No, I was just making a (lame) joke about how you might improve on a free project. I don't hate (or love) MS either.

              I've literally used Visual Studio every working day of my life for the past several decades, and occasionally use VS Code as well. They're both great products, as far as I'm concerned. They've had their ups and downs (VS 2010 was terrible), but I'm really happy with the current versions.

              For the most part, I haven't had issues recently when updating projects from version to version. I think

        • The community edition is free, but you have to log into it to use it. I'm sure they have figured out some way to monetize that data.

          But I will say, over the years, the community edition has become just about the same as the pro edition.

    • Well vs community edition is free and does not have crippled executables unlike it's past express editions. Microsoft also released vs code. I think that was also a jerk reaction to Atom.io.

      Also Microsoft is expanding vs on the Mac.

      In other words Microsoft is scared. Kids today out of booting camps and data scientists are ditching Windows for Macs in groves and Linux too is also a niche option and do not want a locked in proprietary solution like older visual studio releases.

      Oh WSL too is a jerk reaction to

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by truedfx ( 802492 )

        Well vs community edition is free

        For individual developers, for smaller companies, for open source development, sure, but not for everyone. I'm not saying that's a good or a bad thing, just something to keep in mind if you want to use it at work.

  • The only feature I really miss after switching from intellij/webstorm to vscode is the 3-way merge view. Otherwise, for JS work, I don't see the point in going back to their ecosystem.

  • So can we expect it to delete itself 24 hours later [twitter.com], followed by it being discontinued after 8 months [twitter.com]?

  • mmmmkay. Don't hold your breath.

  • I've never understood the point of this gimmickry. Even when I was first learning to code many years ago, the idea that I would somehow not know that "if" was a keyword suggests a level of mental disability that would make it impossible for anyone actually needing it colored to ever be able to code anyway.

    Put comments in a different color? Yes please, that's great. String literals too, just so it's obvious if I missed a closing quote. But coloring EVERY single term in the file in some random shade of dark b

    • Your points hold true until you mention fg/by colors. How is this not a purely aesthetic matter? You only really need a default and night mode from a functional standpoint but I am happy to hear arguments otherwise.

    • I can absolutely see your point, I see some people's IDE's and it's like "WTF? - how do you even code with this multi-coloured mess?"

      And that's one of the biggest problems, the standards seem to have been thrown out of the window - multiple "color themes", multiple different fonts etc.
      I just accept the defaults, because they are usually sane and persist across different coding applications.

      It's a tricky one, because these kinds of helpers can be a hinderance to those new to coding, because they come to rely

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      "If" is an extreme example. Most keywords are longer than 2 characters and it's not difficult to make typos, which syntax highlighting shows up.

      You can configure the colours to your liking in most editors, although I usually find that one of the defaults works well enough for me.

    • I work with legacy code a lot. Color coding of variables can be quite helpful when working with unfamiliar code - knowing if a variable is static/#define/a parameter/a local/a member variable at a glance is quite helpful. Sadly, I work with some code where the programmers thought nothing of creating a 1000-line function now and then with a cyclomatic complexity of 5 million or so (ok, this is a bit of an exaggeration, but not the number of lines in a function) - one can get lost quite easily. Knowing what i

  • I've been a long term user of Jetbrains products and have their "everything" annual license. I got into it when I just felt that NetBeans was just falling too far behind the times. Eclipse seemed like weak tea. Long ago.

    However I think I might be at that time again to trade in the main IDE. VS/Code has come along quite well, and more and more I when I look at online video tutorials (youtube, Udemy, wherever) I see them done in VS/Code where before they were done in WebStorm. I never imagined I'd b

  • I'm the only person left that hates dark themes. As a color blind person it's hard to see light gray on top of dark gray for instance. Is there a legacy option with reasonable colors?

    • Not the only one.

      It is not as if I coded on a white screen all my life. For the first decade of computers all I had was black CRTs with glowing text. When white pixel-mapped displays became available in 1980s I never looked at black again. It was much easier to read, allowing more text on the screen (smaller font scale) and supporting effective high-lighting (light colors, easily seen against white). The human visual system is more efficient picking darker things out against a light background.

      There is a re

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