I'm a huge fan of the JetBrains IDEs, and while I appreciate the thought of modernizing, I really don't like this approach.<p>Their IDEs are extremely powerful and provide many useful tools, and hiding them behind meaningless icons or burying them deep in a smaller number of context menus doesn't do any favors for either discoverability or ease of use.<p>My understanding of simplified UI is that it's meant to be accessible and inclusive to those who have other priorities in life than to spend time learning about the technology and tools they have to use. As a professional developer though, I'm comfortable using computers. It's a core part of the job, and new developers will have to learn this too. It's not helpful to make the UI look prettier by increasing margins (and thus decreasing information density), and it's not helpful to hold our hands and put away the scary text and initially confusing features - on the contrary, that's limiting and counter-productive.<p>I pay for PyCharm, and if I liked VSCode better, I'd use that instead - it's free. I trust JetBrains enough to believe they won't completely replace the existing UI without giving us an option to keep using the current one, but I wish the resources going to developing this were spent in a different design direction or on other improvements.
I hope the existing UI will carry on, its been built-up over the years with lots of features and seems stable.<p>I've put in the time to learn and have muscle memory of the UI, I don't want to see that investment wasted.<p>Finally, Jetbrains, Eclipse etc... were intended for professional and serious uses, I detest having these new Fisher-Price interfaces where everything is dumbed down.<p>I'll be quite vocal about this in feedback to Jetbrains as a paid subscriber.
Based on the screenshot it looks ok to me, but my most often used IDE is and has been Xcode for a long time, with usage of JetBrains (in the form of Android Studio) and Visual Studio (the full fat Windows IDE, not the electron thing) trailing behind at a distant second and third.<p>I just never use half the buttons on the screen by default, partially because I use key shortcuts heavily (JetBrains’ ability to use premade third party keybinds is a godsend for a multi-IDE user — all the usual Xcode shortcuts working is wondrous) or because I ignore the integrated tangentially-related bits like VCS because I prefer to use dedicated apps like Fork[0] for those.<p>So I think this move is fine. The big caveat I’ll add is that they need to keep a proper menubar on Windows and Linux where the system isn’t forcing the presence of such — menubars act as grand indexes of program functionality and are absolutely essential for something like an IDE. Pruning the menubar in favor of one of those blasted hamburger menus would be a huge mistake.<p>[0]: <a href="https://git-fork.com/" rel="nofollow">https://git-fork.com/</a>
Pretty obvious what they're going for here, but a welcome move all the same IMO. I always trim down the UI as much as I can when working on IntelliJ/RubyMine, so I appreciate them making it look like VSCode while still having the powerful IDE tooling underneath.
I haven't used a JetBrains IDE in a while (and that isn't likely to change soon), but I think that the existence of command palettes makes me much more willing to accept a change like this. When the actions and menus I want are available at a moment's notice, all the buttons in a typical IDE are just clutter.
Speaking of UI, I haven't used JetBrains software in some time, so this may be out of date, but:<p>It seems like a lot of software out of Central/Eastern Europe uses (or used) lots of custom UI controls. It gives the programs a certain... feel.<p>Has anyone else noticed this? Did Win32 controls in the past have especially poor support for non-Latin alphabets?
This is interesting. It looks a lot like the experimental UI I've been using via the Material Theme plugin for about a year.<p><a href="https://imgur.com/hiCRTFd.png" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/hiCRTFd.png</a><p><a href="https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/8006-material-theme-ui" rel="nofollow">https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/8006-material-theme-ui</a>
Looks interesting! I hope they do the job well and marry sleek UI design with practicality. The UI is perfectly fine at the moment so I have some slight reservations. I don't think they will have an option to toggle between new and old design once this rolls out as it is a waste of engineering resources to maintain both.