HACKER Q&A
📣 dfrey1

State of Free IDEs


I recently got a new Mac Pro, and I'm setting it up. Which free IDE/setup would you recommend? In general, I'm a fan of JetBrain IDEs, but I don't want to pay for a license.

I have never been fully satisfied with my VSCode setup (and I occasionally found it pretty slow).

So tell me, HN hive-brain - what should I use?

  👤 matt_s Accepted Answer ✓
Code editing and workflow are really personal choices and subjective. I moved from IDE's to Sublime Text because of IDE slowness and annoyances. I made this move back when I did Java stuff and used Eclipse. I've tried VS Code a few times and just can't get into a flow, it feels slow. I find code suggestion popups to be annoying and usually never what I was going to type anyhow.

So I'd say try out text editors rather than IDES: Sublime (free to try out), vim, emacs, etc. They have enough options and plugins, etc. to make them really powerful.

Kinda funny that you have really good hardware and still found VS Code was slow at times. I imagine JetBrains costly subscription options are similar.

👤 andrewfromx
A free option for java/kotlin is always https://developer.android.com/studio which is based on (correct me if I'm wrong) https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/ right?

But c'mon, we all know vim is all you need.

👤 eiiot
Are you getting full use out of VSCode? The main advantage of VSCode (in my opinion) is the community plugins (Vim Keybindings, Tailwind, etc.). What do you feel is missing from your VSCode setup?

Also it's interesting that you find VSCode slow. At least on Mac, I feel like JetBrains is usually less performant.

👤 asicsp
I use GVim, so can't personally recommend an IDE. You mention not wanting to pay for Jetbrain, but don't they have free versions with less features?

Also, check out https://www.kdevelop.org/

👤 foobarbaz33
Emacs and LSP servers work pretty well for some languages. Works great for Go. ripgrep and/or ctags cover any weird languages.

    brew tap d12frosted/emacs-plus
    brew install emacs-plus
👤 throwaway019254
IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition + install plugins you need. Done.
👤 danielbraun
what a cheapskate...