27 votes

WebStorm and Rider are now free for non-commercial use

9 comments

  1. [3]
    regularmother
    Link
    Man, I love JetBrains products and am happy that more languages get to be trialed by new users. My experience with JVM language IDEs have been universally excellent, PyCharm has the best static...

    Man, I love JetBrains products and am happy that more languages get to be trialed by new users. My experience with JVM language IDEs have been universally excellent, PyCharm has the best static linking of any Python IDE I'm aware of, DataGrip is chef's kiss, and RustRover is delightful. Their navigation capability really shines in strongly typed languages or languages with type hints on and available. Excited to see some more uptake in the community for my personal favorite group of IDEs.

    5 votes
    1. [2]
      Minori
      Link Parent
      My only complaint is that Gateway and remote development features still need work. Features I really like such as Code with Me still aren't supported yet.

      My only complaint is that Gateway and remote development features still need work. Features I really like such as Code with Me still aren't supported yet.

      1 vote
      1. regularmother
        Link Parent
        For sure - nothing beats zed.dev there- and their AI Assistant is awful in comparison to cursor.ai, but for core development experience, I think Jetbrains still has it. Most code work is...

        For sure - nothing beats zed.dev there- and their AI Assistant is awful in comparison to cursor.ai, but for core development experience, I think Jetbrains still has it. Most code work is maintenance except at the very start of a company and I think optimizing for the 80% over the 20% is right in general.

        That said, if Jetbrains doesn't step up their AI game by leveraging their static linking and tree analysis into improving their automatic context window input to LLMs, they'll fall behind to Cursor and Zed (the latter of which Anthropic is contributing to directly). This is my biggest pain point but they've made good progress quarter on quarter so I'm bullish here.

        2 votes
  2. [5]
    ButteredToast
    Link
    A cool move, but for web stuff I'd be more inclined to use Sublime Text with an appropriate set of extensions or maybe something like Panic's Nova for their much better snappiness and reduced...

    A cool move, but for web stuff I'd be more inclined to use Sublime Text with an appropriate set of extensions or maybe something like Panic's Nova for their much better snappiness and reduced typing latency. Jetbrains IDEs have a lot of features but they feel rather chunky in comparison.

    3 votes
    1. [2]
      balooga
      Link Parent
      I hadn't seen Nova before! As a longtime Mac user I respect Panic and think this looks like a pretty slick program. Also the way the website lets you interactively explore the app's preferences is...

      I hadn't seen Nova before! As a longtime Mac user I respect Panic and think this looks like a pretty slick program. Also the way the website lets you interactively explore the app's preferences is a great way to show off what's available without installing it — great marketing!

      That said, for my purposes VS Code is basically a perfect IDE. It's fast and feature-rich and insanely extensible. I've used a bunch of programs over the years (including JetBrains' offerings) and none of them come close, IMHO. It would take ages for me to list all my grievances about Microsoft, but credit where it's due: the VS Code team knocked it out of the park. It would take a miraculous alternative (or a royal fuck-up on Microsoft's part) to make me switch at this point.

      5 votes
      1. ButteredToast
        Link Parent
        VS Code is good, but I don't care for some of the MS-isms in its UI (I cut my teeth on REALBasic, Project Builder/Xcode, and TextMate so maybe that's why) and its startup time could be better. Its...

        VS Code is good, but I don't care for some of the MS-isms in its UI (I cut my teeth on REALBasic, Project Builder/Xcode, and TextMate so maybe that's why) and its startup time could be better. Its extension situation is also a mess in some cases, with there being several options in the marketplace and it not being clear which is still maintained and works as expected.

        EDIT: Aside from that I tend toward more "do one thing really well", which has traditionally been the philsophy of both unixlikes and macOS, and so things like VCS integration go unused in favor of dedicated apps like Fork.

        1 vote
    2. 0x29A
      Link Parent
      Sublime Text is definitely my favorite editor. Paid for it and have no regrets. Blazing fast. Tiny, native, efficient. It embodies what modern software has forgotten. That said, still kudos to...

      Sublime Text is definitely my favorite editor. Paid for it and have no regrets. Blazing fast. Tiny, native, efficient. It embodies what modern software has forgotten.

      That said, still kudos to Jetbrains for doing this. Free non-commercial licenses reduce barriers to learning skills, etc.

      I might still give these a try in case they cover a particular use case in a way I really enjoy

      3 votes
    3. redwall_hp
      Link Parent
      It's great that Rider will be more available, since Microsoft discontinued Visual Studio for Mac (not VS Code), which is usually the recommended IDE for Unity. I do see this as a bit of a...

      It's great that Rider will be more available, since Microsoft discontinued Visual Studio for Mac (not VS Code), which is usually the recommended IDE for Unity.

      I do see this as a bit of a walking-back of JetBrains' previous approach though: IntelliJ and PyCharm both have limited Community Editions that don't have restrictions on commercial use. They just have some features disabled. Philosophically, I feel better about paying for features over restrictions on the sort of activity you can do with a tool.

      That said, I really like JetBrains' IDEs, and would pay out of pocket for IntelliJ for work if my employer didn't pay for Ultimate licenses.

      1 vote
  3. devilized
    Link
    Wow, very cool, and perhaps a smart decision on their part. I started using their product free edition, and now I have their all-products pack since I use several of the IDEs and use them for...

    Wow, very cool, and perhaps a smart decision on their part. I started using their product free edition, and now I have their all-products pack since I use several of the IDEs and use them for commercial use. It's actually very reasonably priced once you have continuity discounts.

    2 votes