Jetbrains IDEs

Sub-pages

See the following sub-pages for information on configuration and usage of Jetbrains IDEs in general, and for specific usage of IDEs.

Overview

Jetbrains offers a suite of powerful integrated development environments(IDEs) for all major software development ecosystems.

While they have a somewhat steep learning curve, JetBrains IDEs have many benefits which can make the investment worth it:

  1. Common UI: Although they are separate applications, each IDE shares a common UI and controls, which allows you to easily switch between them without re-learning UX or keybindings.
  2. Powerful proprietary features: The proprietary support for refactoring, indexing, searching, type checking, code navigation, etc., especially for languages without official language server support, is often much more powerful and faster than what is available from other editor ecosystems.
  3. Works out of the box: Since they are language/ecosystem specific, many features work “out of the box”, without the need to find, install, or configure any custom plugins or extensions. For example, ESLint and RuboCop have native support, with no plugins required. However, “power users” or complex projects will often want to customize their configurations.
  4. Curated plugin ecosystem The Jetbrains plugin ecosystem is (subjectively) more “curated” than other editor ecosystems. Most important tools which are not built into the IDE have officially supported plugins provided by JetBrains (e.g. VueJS, Prettier, NodeJS, etc.), and most popular non-Jetbrains plugins only have one or a small number to choose from. This is in contrast to plugin ecosystems such as VS Codes, where there can be dozens of different plugins for each key tool or library, without a clear way to choose between them, and sometimes they will conflict with each other in keybindings or behavior.

JetBrains IDEs are widely used by many developers. The actual usage numbers are often hard to interpret, because most surveys and polls compare each individual IDE (e.g. RubyMine vs. PyCharm vs. IDE) against other non-specialized editors (e.g. vim, emacs, VS Code). But, based on recent surveys, a rough estimate is that about 15% of professional software developers today use one or more JetBrains IDEs.

Setup and Configuration

See the Common Jetbrains Setup and Configuration page for instructions on installing and configuring JetBrains IDEs.

Debugging

See the following IDE-specific pages for tips on debugging:

Keymaps

There’s a lot of keybindings in JetBrains IDEs. Here’s a list for RubyMine: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/ruby/mastering-keyboard-shortcuts.html. You can find the ones for their other IDEs too.

But if you only memorize one keyboard shortcut in JetBrains, make it this one:

  • “Find Action”: Cmd-Shift-A" (Ctrl-Shift-A` on Windows/Linux)

This will let you find a command and execute it, open a tool window, or search for a setting just by typing its name, and you can also see the menu location and shortcut (if defined) next to it. It is similar to “Command Palette” (Cmd-Shift-P) in VS Code.

Although it is a good practice to learn the default keymaps, you will probably want to customize some of your keymaps. See the Configuration section for details and examples on how to configure your own keymap additions/overrides, or copy someone else’s.

Code Inspections

One of the powerful and productivity-enhancing features of JetBrains IDEs is [Code Inspections](https://www.jetbrains.com/help/ruby/running-inspections.html

See more details at Code Inspection

Tracked Jetbrains Issues

We keep a list of all JetBrains issues which are relevant to GitLab, and we want to follow/upvote in hopes that they eventually get fixed.

See the list here: Tracked JetBrains Issues

Getting Help

If you need help, ask in one of the Chat Groups!

Chat Groups

Licenses

If you are a GitLab team member, see the Licenses page for details on how to get JetBrains IDE licenses.

Last modified August 7, 2023: Tidy up jetbrains index page (d5e39e6c)