Great article! LSP brought me back to Emacs. Real IDE support with best in class editing abilities is bliss.
Microsoft really nailed it with LSP (albeit, I agree with the caveats the implementation has some warts). Jetbrains must be sweating - more and more of my colleagues and coworkers are using VSCode these days.
I think Jetbrains should seriously consider LSPifying their backends. If they don't, they risk someone else building a better JVM LSP and then they are going to lose a lot of market share. Plus it gives them the opportunity to shape the LSP spec. I'd happily pay Jetbrains right now a sub just for the backend if I can use it with my editor of choice.
similar to how Rider became immensely popular (1st class Unity Engine support)
and now Rider C++ support for .sln solution and 1st class Unreal Engine support
intellij's problem is their plugin API and development cycle, for a while you needed to restart the whole IDE whenever you wanted to recompile your plugin, as a result, the 3rd-party plugin ecosystem is very poor
they went with JVM so it gives them a poor start already (no comparatif benefit over VSCode and electron, same bloatshit, but they can eat some market share by providing a better out of the box experience)
> intellij isn't popular just for code completion
But it's still ten times better than anything that vscode or Visual Studio offers when it comes to f.e. C#. VS was supposed to get better with IntlliSense but it will still put some obscure system class names higher than your local variables in autocomplete suggestions... It's really hard to get to vscode/VS after using JetBrains products for a while. To me it feels like shooting yourself in the knee just for the sake of being hip and 'cool'.
exactly, i found the same issue with VSCode and various LSP implementations, it's very poor compared to intellij, that IDE knows your code perfectly, as a result navigation is super smooth, you have access to advanced refactoring tools and great debugging support, jetbrains mastered it, they are unmatched, i wish they supported more languages (D, Zig for example)
It really depends on the LSP implementation. Some are pretty bad. Some are really good. For example, Jetbrains Webstorm uses the same Microsoft LSP server as VSCode. Typescript support is really good in VSCode. I also find the golang LSP server to be pretty comparable, although it could use some polish. Another area where VSCode/LSP blows away Jetbrains is with C/C++ code, using something like ccls, and rust with rust-analyzer.
Like I said, in my ideal world, Jetbrains would simply provide commercial LSP servers for all of the things they support. Like you said, they have some of the best in class IDE support for various languages, especially JVM.
Eclipse already did (integrate JVM LSP support). It kinda sucks still in lots of ways, but at the same time, it is pretty surprising how well it works and is totally usable, eg: for working on React. If more work is done on it then it's definitely going to start change things a bit (in part also because Eclipse itself has improved dramatically in the last few years).
Same for me. I used Emacs for many years, but other editors (especially VSCode) were getting better language support and it was starting to feel long in the tooth. With LSP support, it’s amazing again. I’m happy to be back in my favorite environment.
JetBrains new Fleet editor that’s coming out soon uses LSP and looks pretty great.
I’d love an excuse to stop using VS Code, and Fleet is shaping up to be that, without losing the actual plugins I care about (which are largely LSP features anyways).
Microsoft really nailed it with LSP (albeit, I agree with the caveats the implementation has some warts). Jetbrains must be sweating - more and more of my colleagues and coworkers are using VSCode these days.
I think Jetbrains should seriously consider LSPifying their backends. If they don't, they risk someone else building a better JVM LSP and then they are going to lose a lot of market share. Plus it gives them the opportunity to shape the LSP spec. I'd happily pay Jetbrains right now a sub just for the backend if I can use it with my editor of choice.