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:
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.
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.
Your comment feels half-baked at best. You start to talk about “best editors” but you proceed to present your two best examples and neither has anything remotely related to editors.
CLion is undoubtedly the absolute best IDE for C++ projects, and it’s multiplatform on top of it. It’s not even a competition, specially if you’re using CMake. Using Git integration as your best and single example to refute this is extremely puzzling by how silly it is.
Editor/IDE, whatever. People claim both about jetbrains.
If you want a purely editor-thing:
Whatever vscode does with Ctrl+D (I don’t know the name). Ctrl+D is probably the hotkey I use most in vscode (probably more than Ctrl+S), yet CLion doesn’t have that. I’ve searched multiple times the whole settings for it.
Those two examples are just the ones that most recently occurred to me, it has a lot more issues. For example the lack of a staging area. You can’t “git stage” in CLion.
And I don’t think that the git integration is free from criticism. Git integration is one of the most important features of IDEs. It’s absolutely valid to criticize it.
The autoformatter also doesn’t work correctly when developing in remote. Which means that unless I want my PRs to have thousands of lines of whitespace changes, I can’t use the auto formatter.
Now I don’t know if this is a CMake issue or CLion. But at one point It was "#include"ing a struct from a header file I had deleted 1 hour previous to the build failing. The only way to fix that was to create the file again and delete it again.
These complaints might seem small. But put together they are hours of wasted time that you don’t expect from the “best” of something.
I’m a big fan of jetbrains, I think they make awesome product and they’re great with the community. That being said, CLion sucks. If I code in C (which isn’t often), I just use VsCode. It’s much better. IntelliJ, Webstorm and PyCharm are great products though.
I don’t mind paying for tools that help me do my job. For several years I even had a personal licence for “all products pack” thing. Their IDEs do a decent job.
There are better tools for specific things, but overall as an IDE, it’s pretty good and makes you effective. And especially if you have to use Windows, it’s integrating enough tools that you don’t have to mess with the Windows crappy tooling that often.
That said, it’s still a big fat slow IDE. For a while now I’ve been using neovim my modernized Linux toolkit and for the most part, I’m happier with it then I was with IntelliJ and Goland and the rest. Happier enough to not having a licence for JetBrains any more.
And recently I’ve looked into Zed. Zed looks pretty neat so far, but it’s still under development. Once things stabilise there, I might commit to it and switch full time to Zed. It’s got a few nice things that I miss from IntelliJ, but it’s way, way more responsive.
Back on topic: I wanted to say I don’t mind paying for IDEs, if they’re good tools. But this is more of an ideological challenge and I’m always trying to keep myself from overreacting. So while I don’t agree with you in general (“don’t trust paid IDEs”), I might agree with you specifically (“don’t fall for JetBrains’ lure and Microsoft-like tactics”).
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…
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.
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:
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.
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.
Your comment feels half-baked at best. You start to talk about “best editors” but you proceed to present your two best examples and neither has anything remotely related to editors.
CLion is undoubtedly the absolute best IDE for C++ projects, and it’s multiplatform on top of it. It’s not even a competition, specially if you’re using CMake. Using Git integration as your best and single example to refute this is extremely puzzling by how silly it is.
Editor/IDE, whatever. People claim both about jetbrains.
If you want a purely editor-thing:
Whatever vscode does with Ctrl+D (I don’t know the name). Ctrl+D is probably the hotkey I use most in vscode (probably more than Ctrl+S), yet CLion doesn’t have that. I’ve searched multiple times the whole settings for it.
Those two examples are just the ones that most recently occurred to me, it has a lot more issues. For example the lack of a staging area. You can’t “git stage” in CLion.
And I don’t think that the git integration is free from criticism. Git integration is one of the most important features of IDEs. It’s absolutely valid to criticize it.
The autoformatter also doesn’t work correctly when developing in remote. Which means that unless I want my PRs to have thousands of lines of whitespace changes, I can’t use the auto formatter.
Now I don’t know if this is a CMake issue or CLion. But at one point It was "#include"ing a struct from a header file I had deleted 1 hour previous to the build failing. The only way to fix that was to create the file again and delete it again.
These complaints might seem small. But put together they are hours of wasted time that you don’t expect from the “best” of something.
I’m a big fan of jetbrains, I think they make awesome product and they’re great with the community. That being said, CLion sucks. If I code in C (which isn’t often), I just use VsCode. It’s much better. IntelliJ, Webstorm and PyCharm are great products though.
JetBrains git integration is a known mess, true.
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.
I don’t mind paying for tools that help me do my job. For several years I even had a personal licence for “all products pack” thing. Their IDEs do a decent job.
There are better tools for specific things, but overall as an IDE, it’s pretty good and makes you effective. And especially if you have to use Windows, it’s integrating enough tools that you don’t have to mess with the Windows crappy tooling that often.
That said, it’s still a big fat slow IDE. For a while now I’ve been using neovim my modernized Linux toolkit and for the most part, I’m happier with it then I was with IntelliJ and Goland and the rest. Happier enough to not having a licence for JetBrains any more.
And recently I’ve looked into Zed. Zed looks pretty neat so far, but it’s still under development. Once things stabilise there, I might commit to it and switch full time to Zed. It’s got a few nice things that I miss from IntelliJ, but it’s way, way more responsive.
Back on topic: I wanted to say I don’t mind paying for IDEs, if they’re good tools. But this is more of an ideological challenge and I’m always trying to keep myself from overreacting. So while I don’t agree with you in general (“don’t trust paid IDEs”), I might agree with you specifically (“don’t fall for JetBrains’ lure and Microsoft-like tactics”).
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.