When it comes to programming there are a handful of choices in regards to text editors or IDEs.

On one hand we have the old school options: vim and emacs which are great choices and have been improved over the years to support any possible need developers have. Where they stagnated is in regards to user experience, being very hard to setup, configure and maintain. Their user experience is not the best and there is quite a big learning curve in regards to configuring and creating the ultimate experience for your needs.

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Other options are products from JetBrains which are very popular, depending on the language you use:

• AppCode – iOS/macOS;
• CLion – cross-platform, for C and C++;
• DataGrip – many databases, one tool;
• DataSpell – for professional data scientists;
• GoLand – for GO code with extended support for Javascript, Typescript and databases;
• Intellij IDEA – Java projects;
• PhpStorm – PHP projects;
• WebStorm – frontend development;
• PyCharm – python projects;
• Rider .NET;
• RubyMine – Ruby and Rails.

One of the most popular ones and widely used is Visual Studio Code. It’s a great tool with a huge community which creates plugins for any developer needs. It is easy to configure, great user experience and free. If you are using Vscode make sure to check our WSL ultimate development setup here.

It’s a text editor that comes with plenty of plugins to match most, if not any, developer’s need. It can support most of the popular programming languages.

It’s been a long time since a new code editor was created from scratch.

What all the above JetBrains products have in common is that they all look and behave kind of the same, being built using the same infrastructure. Until now. There is a completely rewritten code editor for programmers from this great company which helped millions of developers create a better experience for their work environment.

Meet Fleet – Next-generation IDE by JetBrains

Fleet is written from scratch using JetBrain’s experience in building so many development products covering a wide range of programming languages. It uses the Intellij code-processing engine, with a distributed architecture and a refreshing UI.

What it promises

Performance

At its core it’s a lightweight text editor which can easily transform into a fully fledged code editor, with the Intellij code-processing engine running separately from the editor itself.

Smart

It comes with all the base features that all developers need: project and context aware code completion, navigation to definitions and usages, on-the-fly code quality checks and quick-fixes.

Run locally or in Cloud

You can run it locally on your machine or run it remotely on Space, remote machine, Docker or Cloud.

This means that you can work collaboratively on the same project with other people at the same time. Hence you can share your editor, terminals and debugging sessions, perform code reviews, explore the code etc, with zero setup.

Others can connect to your session running locally on your machine or on a shared dev environment.

I think this is very exciting functionality, being able to intervene in a colleague’s code when he has some issues or explaining on the go by collaboratively editing the same code.

Supported Languages

It will support out of the box, with very little to no configuration, most popular languages. From Java to Kotlin, Python, Go language, Javascript, Rust, Typescript, PHP, C++, C#, HTML etc.

What it tries to achieve if to take advantage of the code-processing engine and detect automatically what kind of project is opened, offering the same experience for different programming languages. Currently what we do is configure the project inside our editor to create the environment we are looking for. Fleet tries to do the other way around, the editor to adapt to your project.

Built-in Tools

Conclusions

Fleet is now under Closed Review so it’s not yet available to be used. It was announced on November 29th and I am really excited to get my hands on it and play!

Might this be the code editor that will make us switch away from Vscode ? Let me know your opinion in the comments section below!

You can find more information on JetBrain’s website here.