I know people complain about lag in vscode but I have personally never experienced/noticed any. So with that in mind what does rider give that vscode cannot?
There’s tons of overlap between the two, and for casual development VSCode will usually be fine. But as a professional I rely on IDEA to make a living, and it rarely lets me down.
95% of everything I could ever need comes out-of-the-box, so I don’t need to go plugin hunting (though there is a broad range of IDEA plugins too). In fact the IDEA plugins are cross-compatible, so plugins for Rider will work in PhpStorm, PyCharm, Rubymine, etc.
The refactoring is outstanding, and leaps beyond what VSCode can do it. Basically it just understands my code like a real developer would. Not just simply checking syntax, but understanding project structure, naming conventions, coding styles, and more.
PhpStorm gives me access to a full debugger, with inline breakpoints and execution step controls. “Find Usages” is incredibly thorough and even understands dynamic symbol names in many cases.
Also I get a full MySQL and Redis client, right there in the UI. I can click on strings which refer to column names in my code, and they’ll appear in the DB panel instantly.
At the end of the day these are power-user features, but I’m glad to have them and feel significantly more productive in a JetBrains IDE. Embracing static analysis and a full IDE was probably the single most beneficial upgrade to my skills and career.
I really hope they move PhpStorm to the same payment model as Rider so I can also use it for my own non-work projects.
Granted it’s been 2 years but has it evolved since then even?
PhpStorm was superior out of the box as recently as 2 years ago, is another way of putting it
The other paradigm is to have actual tooling and UX specialists having put time and effort curating a developer experience that is as smooth and distraction free as possible. And in my experience with the JetBrains IDEs, that doesn't even come at the cost of extensibility (you still have support, either official or community-based, for esoteric stacks and languages, and those can piggyback on the more sophisticated and adequate UX palette).
What should be the deciding factor is the resource consumption, then: if you end up with a less refined and less capable LSP+Extension enhanced text editor, it better be lightweight, right? Well, here again it's pretty clear that those LSPs and Extensions are everything but that, and not only JetBrains IDEs start fast (which was a big area of focus recently), they also respond better using comparable resources.
Just to be clear, I don't hate vscode, I have it installed, but the extent I use it is very limited because it sits in this uncanny valley where it's too bloated for one-off editing of small things like config files (for which I use vim) and editing whole projects folders (for which it's far from delivering as good an experience as an IDE)
What kind of nonsense is that, lmao. JetBrains IDEs absolutely choke on our Java monorepo out of the box and you have to rely on huge hacks to make it work. While VScode works just fine and stays responsive while indexing in background allowing to move around and modify files without any lag.
And GOD FORBID you close it, open it again and be greeted with 30 minutes of “indexing”. Their tooling is so great, that they had to migrate their homebrew Java tooling in CLion to clangd (C++ LSP) based indexer.
Android Studio is another level of awful and if someone would release Kotlin LSP I’d migrate in an instant. But of course JetBrains won’t release it, because it doesn’t drive IDE sales.
"Download an editor and install a random collection of dodgy looking plugins from random authors that will get you maybe 80% of the functionality you want
Enjoy watching the plugins downloading random .exes from all over the place
Any semi-advanced functionality is hidden in a complicated command palette system and a plethora of JSON files
Groovy support? Haha! You're funny
Need to view data in other format than a list/tree view? Get fucked
Good luck!"
Thank God at least someone speeds up eradication of this abomination from mainstream ecosystem.
The difference is big.
Also, often I think to myself "I wish feature X was available", only to find that it is and has been for a while in Jetbrains products.
There's no real need for any plugins because everything I need for my workflows is included out of the box.
It even has support for build agents in docker or bare metal either locally or remote. It includes remote GDB debugging. I can with a single button launch a docker container on a remote server which cross-compiles, uploads the binary to my tablet, launches the app with GDB attached and gives me normal debugging tools including breakpoints and a console. All out of the box with no dependencies required apart from docker.
Interesting to see so many comments talking about extensions, and how you don't need to install any.
In vscode I only have the remote development extensions installed, and I think those come "built in" anyway. I just use a vanilla clean vscode install and its an absolute pleasure to use.
If extensions (or lack of) are the main reason given for not using vscode, then for me at least as someone who does not use extensions in vscode and just use it "as is", there seems to be no benefit.
I guess this lack of any actual incremental value to the average typical end user of vscode (i.e. someone who can just use vscode as-is without needing to install loads of plugins and customizations...) is why they are now giving rider away for free.
The old saying: there are no IDEs, only code editors and Jetbrains products.
One is an IDE, the other is an editor. If you want an editor, of course you will not be happy if you use an IDE
You don’t have to install any plugin to be productive. Though there is a rich ecosystem of plugins but it’s more to allow you to install "bonus" integrations and features where in VSCode it’s necessary because you basically have to build your own IDE. If you don’t install anything, it’s like VS : open your project, click on build, it’s built.
Just try it, in the first start you’ll be asked which keyboard bindings you want to use, just choose VSCode and you’ll feel at home.
VSCode has Solution File and Nuget support with the C# Dev Kit. Refactoring isn't bad either though not as featureful as I remember from Resharper.
Start using JetBrains products - you’ll experience many.
And before I get rained with downvotes I’ve been using JetBrains on various machines for over 10 years. From netbook with Cameron and 2GB of RAM to M1 Pro and M3 MacBooks with 32 GB of RAM.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2022...
I'd also like to note the great integration Rider has with Godot and Unity for game development.
I say this as a big user of JetBrains - I have had SOME issues with their intellisense dropping some references in Rider when there are a lot of references, so I would occasionally switch to VS when there were a lot of references to search through, but other than extreme cases Rider is just so much more pleasant to use.
I use VS Code daily for .NET development. It's probably 70% of what VS on Windows is, but it works well and I don't need to run a VM for it (if I need some of the in-depth tracing and profiling stuff, I can still fire up the gold standard). VS on Mac was maybe 30%
Sure but VS Code for C# is trash as well. All those years, both Microsoft products, and this the experience is subpar, especially in comparison to the real Visual Studio.
> It's probably 70% of what VS on Windows is
no. From my perspective, it doesn’t even have 50% of VS features, and that’s probably a generous estimation. VS has lots and lots of features. Granted, many of them are irrelevant for most users most of the time.
Even Rider is lacking in comparison. It is very limited regarding debugging targets for example.
Microsoft had continued to evolve it. And a few components from Visual Studio Windows were ported over to be common. But Visual Studio Mac was 100% rebranded Xamarin Studio which of course was just an evolution of MonoDevelop.
If you are writing code that you are going to be paid for, you are supposed to pay.
Of course, they know a lot of small devs will use it that should not. But few of them would have paid anyway and this creates a much greater pool of buyers when those devs get jobs or achieve commercial success.
I am a Rider fan so this is exciting.
Curious where the line is if you're using it during a YouTube video that you have a Patreon for etc.
I think most games built never make money.
I wish Godot's syntax for .NET wasn't horrible though. Its so nasty looking that it just makes me want to use their native language instead.
This is Unreal's license for those that don't know it:
* Game developers (royalties apply after $1 million USD gross product revenue) = Free
* Individuals and small businesses (with less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue) = Free
Another thing they can do is what they do with YouTrack. 1~2 devs, free, after that X per major version or Y per year.
As a .NET dev for many years, I've noticed there have been periods of time where either Visual Studio or Rider was far better than the other. Currently, Rider is much better.
Hopefully this encourages more people to try out C# & F#. Both fantastic languages.
- Edit - Looks like Webstorm (JS/TS editor) is also free now.
I've found myself totally satisfied with just VS Code on macOS (it's come a really long way).
I'm glad that this move will possibly make .NET more accessible, but I think VSC is in a really good place with C# at the moment and shouldn't be overlooked.
It's a very good choice though for a lot of projects. It's also a great way to try out C#. It has some amazing extensions for certain tasks too.
Not using the C# Dev kit, the old OmniSharp stuff is miles behind Rider. It is really poor in comparison.
I've been a previous subscriber, but I let my license lapse after this announcement. I don;t really need to be on the "latest and greatest" train, and I can get my company to buy me a license if a new feature comes in that I need commercially. I have got a perpetual fallback Rider license, but I will also use the non-commercial licenses to do any OS work in my spare time going forward (which is mostly on Mac and why I had a paid licence initially anyway.)
Are you heavily using typescript with a bit of c# or a really tiny code base?
This comment is incomprehensible to me. Do you never refactor code? There are a lot of sophisticated things you can’t do with VSC.
It’s a great editor; but not for c#.
The benefit of using it is absolutely zero unless you’re heavily leaning into the other parts of the VSC ecosystem (like a big typescript code base).
> it’s come a really long way
So has visual studio; and it started off better, and still is.
Rider is too.
I’m happy to die on this hill; if you’re using VSC for c#, it’s because it’s free, and perhaps good enough for some things; not because it’s better than the alternatives.
Even if you’re stuck on a Mac, I can't believe you honestly find VSC an acceptable editor after using rider.
All I can say is I certainly do not agree.
For those developing commercial software on a budget, Visual Studio Code is an excellent option.
Although it lacks some features of JetBrains and Microsoft tools, pairing the .NET CLI with VS Code can still deliver impressive results.
if you can afford $10 monthly, integrating GitHub Copilot with VS Code can elevate it to a fancy, lightweight IDE
For advanced scenarios Rider still rules, and this change is a very welcome one. I hope it will help with promoting .NET as the first choice where teams historically picked Go (which is worse).
Wow. VSCode finally got them, it seems.
It came out swinging with a very early open beta and seemed to market itself as the coming replacement for all their IDEs, because all their IDEs would become plugins of sorts under the Fleet architecture, but have a dramatically easier API to develop against for plugin authors, be snappier, load quickly be less memory intensive etc.
From the looks of it now they changed the wording and messaging around Fleet as a longer term project and they seem to have gone back to mainly doubling down on pushing their bespoke IDEs, which ain’t a bad thing
Rider is the only comparable DX to VS outside Windows.
On a side note, if you code in JS/TS and you are a full-stack or backend dev, use PhpStorm instead. It is essentially Webstorm (+ PHP) + all the database tools. Those tools are one of the big reasons I bought their software with my own money.
Resharper is a plug-in that is hosted by Visual Studio.
Resharper in Rider is pretty much the same as in VS, but in Rider it is native and always feels snappier to me.
It's a bootstrapped, European company, doing $400M+ annually in revenue selling to developers (who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay).
Somehow VS Code tried to swing me away from it, but it just never ever came close to whatever JetBrains could offer. And it's only going to keep getting better. It's great that it's now free for non-commercial usage. And when I really work on projects that make money, I don't mind paying $100 a year anyway.
And who more often than not get their software imposed on by the orgs they work in, so it's doubly complicated - the developers have to be convinced themselves enough to be willing to convince their IT department/fellow developers to pay for.
All of whom, strangely, expect to be paid for their work.
I used to think I'd just use free open-source software until I became a developer myself.
Now, I believe people should be compensated for their work, even open-source developers who contribute their time and skills for free.
I think you meant Enterprise software that can cost a lot. a developer can't afford that.
Citation very much needed?
Unless you're talking about enterprise software specifically, developers are probably among the most willing to shell out cash for software, it's the general public who seems to be fine with ad-ridden spyware freemium nonsense as long as it's free.
It’s more complicated than “developers are cheap”. They understand software complexity, and when paying is justified. They know what a clear online grift looks like. They have and make free software. I’m happy to pay the JetBrains subscription because it’s actually good enough to warrant the price. You can’t trick a carpenter into buying a poorly build and/or overpriced cabinet by putting a fancy handle on it.
I am sure the public market has made the general public reap the rewards of large companies (kudos!) but some of the privately owned companies are absolutely kicking ass to serve their customers instead.
Rider is a really great product - probably the next generation of coders will be split between VS Code and Rider with this change.
Making Rider free to try is the correct strategy for them. Obviously they want to compete directly with VSCode, but they're burning a lot of good will in their existing customer base in the process.
I left my last company (pretty large, ~1500 employees at the time IIRC) for a variety of reasons, but that was the primary driver. I'd joined on when they were privately owned by the guy who founded it. Then they got some private equity investment group to buy out part of the company. Then they did an IPO. Everyone was SUPER excited about the IPO. I didn't pay too much attention, I was focused on the product my team was building. ESOP was nice. But within a year we were being pushed hard to cut corners and get a half-baked version of the product out to market instead of building it to do the job well like we'd planned from day 1. Ironically, if we hadn't been constantly badgered and having our priorities flipped back and forth, I bet we would have had a useful, functional version of the initial plan out the door by the time I left, with the proper foundation to keep building and expanding it to solve the problems our customers were experiencing with the old system. But now the old system's problems are deeply embedded in the new system, because it was quicker to shove out the door that way.
On the contrary, the place I'm at now is a much smaller company, and the founder/CEO has stated in no uncertain terms that we'll never be sold out to investors because it would mean that we'd be beholden to interests contrary to building the product our customers want and running the company in a long-term sustainable manner.
Ha! Heard that one before. Company was sold. Founder got filthy rich, bean counters came in, you know the rest.
But being a public company wouldn't make it any better.
As a customer: They're making gaming on Linux awesome, and my SteamDeck has killed off my console usage (YMMV), I love it so much. I'm way happier to buy games on Steam where it funds cool initiatives like that than on Epic where a big chunk of the value is accrued by TenCent and Disney.
As a game dev Steam also brings a lot of value: A big customer base, to the point where a game with mid-tier popularity can still do brisk business (not nearly as true on Epic). Their backend is unintuitive but has loads more features than EOS. They also offer really cool tech like SDR (Steam Datagram Relay), etc. If you're selling a PC game, there's no better place to be and you get value for the premium.
People publishing games just have to do the math and see if the benefits justify the costs.
It’s also important to note that if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics. This is similar to our Early Access Program (where statistics is opt-out) and in compliance with our Privacy Policyhttps://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/settings-usage-statistic...
That said, if you mean "checked" as in checking for compliance, I don't think anonymous usage statistics are for that. For that they would need to not be anonymous. If they could identify who was improperly using the community versions, it would break the pinky promise of anonymity. (And for the record I personally doubt they are secretly correlating anonymous usage statistics, but if they were, using them for license compliance would involve either revealing that they did this or at least parallel construction.)
That all said, I think everyone will just have to form their own opinion on whether to trust their statements and whether this is acceptable.
Windows exists to sell ads and Microsoft services, and no one can go anywhere because they're locked into legacy software, and Microsoft constantly abuses that position. JetBrains IDEs exist to sell themselves to businesses as a productivity tool. They benefit from making it actually good because no one is locked in and they have real competition.
Not to mention an OS has more access to my data than an IDE. If JetBrains suddenly decided they'd bundle a feature in IntelliJ where they constantly record my entire screen at all times, I'd be much more wary about their telemetry.
Mandating telemetry for the free version makes a lot of sense. They want to understand how people are using their software so they can improve it. Looking at how someone uses your software before they decide not to buy it seems pretty valuable.
But also I suspect Jetbrains management wants more telemetry period. They've discovered that they don't know how power users work with their software because they've all had telemetry off for years.
Catch JetBrains doing something dodgy enough and there will be a similar shitstorm against them.
I do see the /!\ sunset /!\ warning but until they actually do nuke it, it could still be helpful
> While we’ve had some growth in terms of adoption, we didn’t reach the market share we had hoped for. We believe that the time has come to sunset the product and focus our efforts in other directions.
[0] https://blog.jetbrains.com/appcode/2022/12/appcode-2022-3-re...
Just more Big Tech setting the terms for all of us trying to make a living.
And Rider was built on IntelliJ and ReSharper, two products that successfully "competed with free" for many years before then.
So, if anything, I'd say that JetBrains is at worst reasonably well-positioned to survive dumping by larger competitors with more diverse product lines.
I'm a huge fan of the JetBrains IDEs - the way it understands code relieves so much mental overhead when tracing through my code, finding usages, refactoring, etc. It's one of the rare pieces of software I actually enjoy using. I just can't justify the cost for personal use for the amount I use it, and the fact that I've never really monetized a side project.
Super happy they're making this move. I think there's good logic to getting people hooked with free personal use so they can convince their company to buy licenses for everyone at work.
I've been a Jetbrains user & proponent for many years, with most of my usage in WebStorm. But over the last ~2-3 years I've faced more and more bugs, some sitting open for weeks and months. Just for a short selection:
- The autocomplete popup sometimes froze the IDE completely (and killing the process caused minutes of data loss), open for close to a year[0]
- Since two months ago, the Typescript language server fails to start in Vue projects (due to a broken update by the Vue team). A fixed version of WebStorm was released yesterday, in the meantime you were apparently expected to search for the error message, stumble upon the YouTrack page, and apply a workaround[1]
- Performance is abysmal in a larger React MUI project, think 10-15 seconds for feedback on code changes, sometimes errors just stick around for a good minute or more[2]
- In some situations WebStorm makes autocomplete suggestions that aren't allowed - think effectively a type T with keys K | L, where Omit<T, K> leads to only suggesting K properties, while removing the Omit makes it suggest both K and L properties
- After updating from 2024.1.X to 2024.2.Y, the window had no buttons for minimizing/maximizing anymore. Now, this was partially caused by my environment, but after I found a workaround it was closed as "Third Party Problem". Still feels like a regression to me, since my environment did not change.
These are some of the more memorable ones from this year, but it feels like there's a new one every week. I'm pretty close to dropping my subscription, and this news doesn't fill me with confidence that the necessary investments in Q&A will be made.
[0]: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-6171/Random-freezes...
[1]: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WEB-68756/Vue-LS-2.x-Co...
[2]: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WEB-59766/Very-slow-cod...
I'm pretty close to dropping my subscription, and this news
doesn't fill me with confidence that the necessary investments
in Q&A will be made.
I don't mind paying for a good product, but I want the experience to be less irksome than the free offerings out there, I get enough annoying advertising from free stuff I use, if I'm paying good money, I don't want that.
What are the most compelling reasons to switch? I have heard lots of praise but little substance so far.
For .NET dev it seems hard for any IDE to rival VS Studio's tight integration with the whole MS + .NET ecosystem.
Sadly this has changed: JetBrains does not seem to care very much about F# these days, and Rider has similar bugs to what Visual Studio had in 2016-2020. It is a bad option for F# developers.
On very large solutions I've found VS to be completely unusable.
Is it objectively (significantly) more performant?
How does the MAUI app development experience compare?
Code completion?
IIS-integration?
Debugging?
Look and feel?
WPF / XAML designer?
File explorer?
Git integration?
...
Rider is better either way, but definitely better than alternatives on MacOS.
first year - $289.00 (+$116)
second year - $231.00 (+$58)
third year onwards - $173.00
you're locked in because of an extra $116 the first year and $58 the second year?
https://www.jetbrains.com/store/?section=personal&billing=ye...
You can choose to pay every 3 or 4 years rather than yearly if you don't want to be locked in, but it will come out as a similar cost overall
Theming has moved on a fair bit too...
This was a few ago, so they may have improved that part by now, I've just carried my theme over the updates.
if you make a game, then it gets popular what happens ? or some .net api?
I'm always confused by such licensing terms e.g what ended up happening with Unity.
If you're not going to sell it, it's probably not commercial use.
My take would be, when decision to earn money one should buy the license for sure.
I don't think you can somehow pay for previous use and I expect no one will hold it against you.
But at the same time if you "develop non commercially" and you know you will be trying to monetize it most likely it will be hard to prove and no one has resources to catch every such case but remember that you become "big POS" for that.
all the while you coulda probably just made it in VS code for free...
One thing to note that I just learned: You cannot opt out of anonymous data collection if you use the free non-commercial license. (I'd probably still trust Jetbrains over Microsoft, but that's me)
https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/10/24/webstorm-and-ride...
I'd definitely recommend trying it out now that it's free. Your taste may vary.
* you have mixed C#/F# projects in a solution (C# and F# support in VSCode can't communicate today)
* you use Rider for other technology
* you want paid support for your editor tools
* you prefer IDE-style experiences rather than editor/ extension-style experiences
* you want to take advantage of Rider features like their accelerated build caching
For example, I'm using VS Code to work on a back-end based on Deno, which has a plug-in for VS Code. Would I find Rider a less-hospitable development environment?
Like VS, Rider will also do C++. In fact, CLion (their purpose built C++ IDE) is now running on Rider's backend. I'm sure that makes Rider very powerful for C++, but I haven't really tried.
Rider is bar none the best IDE I've used and I've been subscribed for six or seven years now.
As far as C++ goes, I wonder (based on the info you've provided) what CLion offers that Rider doesn't.
These days I am mostly using NeoVim.
I decided today to stop supporting JetBrains BECAUSE there is no good kotlin language server.
I would gladly pay them money even if I don't use their IDEs if only they provided a good language server.
https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/10/24/webstorm-and-ride...
Also looks like an online account is required.
"You agree that the product will send usage data to validate your compliance with the license terms and anonymous feature usage statistics..."
"The information collected under Sections 4.1. and 4.2. may include but is not limited to frameworks, file templates used in the Product, actions invoked, and other interactions with the Product’s features."
Not just that, they will do some yucky things to exfiltrate data from your network to enforce this.
ie. How many devs will really use it in it's "free" state as titled? Fewer and fewer I suspect.
I'm sceptical about the prevalence of non-AI-centred-IDEs going forward - we live in a new era now - and I guess JetBrains have also come to that conclusion and this is a pivot to support the thesis.
The only behaviour that annoys me a bit:
- Double clicking an identifier should select the full identifier. However, in Rider (as opposed to Visual Studio) it is connected to the CamelHump setting - which is useful by itself. In Visual Studio you can have both CamelHump enabled and “double clicking the identifier selects the whole identifier”.
- Any startup project tasks like maybe a “webpack watch task” is “in the way” when stopping run/debug of your current application. A separate task runner like in Visual Studio would be beneficial.
- If a solution has file templates defined, every user needs to activate/select them manually in the settings. Quite cumbersome.
I can't believe that this late in the game my team has no choice but to actually give up on jetbrains for some time. We tried our best to make it work with their products because we enjoy them dearly. But if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. VSCode has a mature, and most important functioning, devcontainer ecosystem.
Not sure if Rider even has devcontaier support but good for jetbrains for releasing a community edition.
Rider saved me some sanity when I had to work with .Net.
It's just too bad that their UI is going in the direction of VSCode and others, become more... I guess I could say smartphone-like.
How else am I supposed to get convinced into buying it given the (probably more mature) default choice of VS Studio 22?
Reading about the rationale for this move this seems to be precisely their reason too.
Anyway, might try it out after all now given all the fuss ...
I do have a few gripes though. I wish the performance was better on my current setup on my M2 MBP. It is an awful experience when tools get in your way and break your flow. The file sync to MacOS is fairly laggy and new files that are created can take seconds to appear. UI interactions can be laggy. Sometimes invoking the context sensitive intentions/actions is blocking where it will hang for seconds. I need to keep my movements fluid to keep my train of thoughts on the track and not be derailed by my ADD.
I also would like a plug-in system that wasn't entirely on Kotlin, Groovy and Java. I did Groovy dev in a past life but it's painful for me today. Thankfully ChatGPT gets me most of the way there. I wish there were JS/TS bindings to build upon.
Overall, I'm pleased with JetBrains. I appreciate their content they put out on YouTube to further empower the developers that use their products with knowledge and guidance of efficiencies. I'll continue using it as my core IDE for the foreseeable future. I have augmented my flow with a bit of Cursor but JetBrains is the bread and butter.