Programming

jetbrains is opensource. https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

if you want the enterprise features then yes, you get a closed source version, but otherwise you can just run intellij from years ago if you really wanted.

I'm also quite desperate for an alternative to android-studio, but unfortunately nothing is close yet.

kmp-lsp shows promise, but it has very limited intellisense and shows no errors.

I'm confused. Are you looking for a fancy text editor (VS Code) or a full IDE (Most Jetbrains Products, the actual Visual Studio's)?

Either way, for a fancy text editor, there's VS Codium. Just VS Code without MS bs like telemetry and stuff. Works really well, I switched as soon as I heared about it and never looked back.

Now when it comes to a full blown IDE, I don't think there is anything comparable, especially when you look at features vs cost. Free, or even FOSS solutions, won't even come close to Jetbrains products and I never bothered looking for enterprise solutions since I can't afford them anyway. Depending on your language requirements and OS choice there's Visual Studio of course and even Community used to be pretty good, but I haven't used that one since my switch to Linux so I can't tell how it perfoms nowadays.

Now if I'm wrong, my information is outdated or I may not know about some software that is actually really neat, please correct me.

There's vscodium too, but the remote extension then is not the same as built in o.g... And oh my pi or any other cli agent would do it.

Else, and keeping it up for having remote editing, I'd suggest emacs doom.

I used to be a JetBrains user for a long time. I now use Gram, a really nice fork of Zed that strips out features that some users may find unsavoury (AI integration, GitHub integration). I don't deeply care about an editor including these features, but I don't use them, so they're unnecessary bloat to me. Gram lets you set a base keymap to be most similar to another editor/IDE you might be used to, and this includes a JetBrains keymap, which is what I use.

If you want the whole AI integration stuff, just use upstream Zed. It's more or less otherwise the same from an end user perspective.

You might dislike it for being too VSCode-y insofar as it's closer to a lightweight editor than to a full IDE like JetBrains products. I would like it if it were more fully featured and felt more like a full IDE, but it works for my purposes, and it is way more responsive thanks to running natively rather than being a JVM program. It's not a RAM hog like JetBrains IDEs either.

I think Jetbrains is still fine as an editor but yes, the tooling is getting worse and worse. I recently stopped using the DB tool because it simply wasn't able to reliably connect to my databases. Dbeaver is working great with same databases. For a easy fix that would be my recommendation: community editor Jetbrain tolls for editing code, external tools for git/db/docker and so on.

For personal projects I use neovim and while is a great editor with all the features I need it is a constant struggle. Maintaining configuration is really difficult. If you're using nvim already turning it into IDE can be a fun project. If you're not familiar with it I wouldn't recommend it for development. There's just too much work.

Emacs!

For Java? No equivalent. Honestly it's kinda embarrassing how good Intellij was when I used it, at least compared to the alternatives. For other languages, depends on how much work you're able to accept. Vim can be a large upfront cost in work, but a tailor fit result may be worth it. Them again, I will admit that I prefer the IDE (where applicable) stay minimal.

I moved to neovim several years ago and haven't looked back. Sounds like I got out at the right time

I use kakoune with kakoune-lsp. Definitely not an IDE but it's served my programming needs well.

i use both neovim with lazyvim inside tmux for small edits and jetbrains (pycharm, clion, rider, datagrip, dataspell) for longer larger work sessions. git is best operated in the console, never used any git tools in any ide. they are just overly complicating something super simple. AI can stay out of my editors. if you must use AI there is always oh-my-pi.

I don't know of any other IDE maker that has the depth and quality of language support that JetBrains offers.

Honestly, throwing your toys over a modal commit dialog seems a bit misguided when switching to any other IDE is going to involve coping with much bigger changes.

You have the option of using an old version if the newer ones aren't to your style. I'm still on the 2023 version of PyCharm, for instance. And the 2020 version of PhpStorm, haha

I switched to Zed from VSCode maybe around 2 years ago and havent looked back.

It's open source with GPL3 license and has plenty of languages supported via LSP.

If you need AI support they have this natively via the Agents panel and you can also use terminal agents in there BUT if you don't you can just hide the agents panel and never connect to any account and you never really see any of the AI features. This is essentially what I do for private work where I don't use AI, and for my job where we are soft-forced to adopt.

Super easy to port over your settings.json from VScode with all your shortcuts etc already.

Eclipse is worth trying. If you can get past its slightly psychotic autocomplete it's an excellent IDE.

I’ve been using jetbrains for many years. I believe I have cursed at their products over 1000 times, opened or tracked issues, seen bugs take many years to be fixed, lived with other bugs.

I’ve seen how their adaptations for AI broke many things that worked; I’ve learned, over many years, to subscribe, but use products that are released in the fall or winter because there are too many bugs earlier in the year. So often my copies are not new.

Yet I never have found a replacement I like better.

I use jetbrains IDE since years, and I did some really strange stuff with them.

I used clion with experimental GCC builds and crashed the IDE multiple times. Opened a bug. Got fixed.

We found a bug in their Datagrip Sybase DWH integration. I met some of their team at a conference a week later, talked with them about the bug in person, got fixed during the day.

Sure, bugs may take a while, but thei get fixed.

And to AI. Cursor should be able to connect to jetbrains IDEs from the outside.

There is no other, universal, IDE stack that can come close. Ok, maybe if you are willed to invest weeks in an emcas or neovim setup