Equivalents because VSCode and its forks are not an equivalent.
TL;DR Jetbrains is getting worse, more like VSCode. I want out to something as powerful but not VSCode like (which is worse).
Jetbrains has been chasing VSCode’s popularity to the detriment of its own product.
The modal commit dialog is now opt-in, behind a nearly hidden, advanced parameter and will be removed in the not so distant future. This was part of their effort to make the UI “leaner” and more like VSCode so now Jetbrains IDEs look more like it.
Some keyboard shortcuts have also had to be changed to be more like VSCode.
Jetbrains used to have a good docker integration, but that’s either unmaintained or undergoing work to support dev-containers better - something that jetbrains practically had nearly a decade ago, which allowed you to code on another server (remote development).
AI Assistant and Junie (their coding agents which I have to use for work) have consistently been behind the curve and just keep getting worse. They have 2 separate products for agentic development and can’t decide which to keep, so they duplicate efforts and fail at both. Now I’m asking my employer to just give me Cursor like the rest of the team, so I don’t have to put up with this Jetbrains crap.
Privately, AI it’s non-starter anyway, but my guess is that Jetbrains is also focussing more development efforts on that than actually fixing existing bugs.
In my experience the alternatives are usually worse. I would use Neovim but the debugging experience with hot reload in C# is pretty good. When I find a shortcut out of place I just add my own and git is better in the terminal anyway when you setup good aliases like “pullr” for “git pull origin main --rebase”.
I know, not helping, but the best open source alternative to Jetbrains is Neovim in my experience but it really depends on the language and stack you’re on.
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 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 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
