[makeitdouble]

This is an undue attack. We buy our computers and screens and keyboards, most of us are on commercial OS, we pay for SaaS at a non trivial price, and most of us also use additional personal apps that aren't free (including password managers, mail clients etc.). Those are actual tools for the trade.

Arguing we should also buy every Jetbrains product is like arguing carpenters should buy line drawing AR goggles. Perhaps some will see the value in it, but it's far from an noncontroversial POV. If you feel a tool as as much downsides than upsides in your workflow, you don't use it, whatever its price is.

[philliphaydon]

“I’ll pay $1000’s to get all setup and running with everything I need, including a bunch of stuff I don’t need, but not the last $90 for some productive software to make more money”

Yeah ok.

[lodovic]

Some people really like these tools, and that is OK. But not everyone has the same workflow. I personally get a JetBrains license from the project I work on - but I refuse to use it, as I find their tools pedantic, slow, and eating my computer's resources. Ymmv.

[philliphaydon]

Oh absolutely, if someone perfers emacs or vim, VS, VSCode, some JetBrains IDE. Punch cards.

Whatever makes them happy and productive, that's great. I've seen people use Vim and its crazy how productive some people are with it.

My point is complaining about the price of some software like it's blocking them from doing anything. They spend all this money on all this hardware and software, but when it comes to development, oh it costs too much I don't want to pay $90 for something to earn money...

[makeitdouble]

The initial [0] only mentioned the steep price in passing, and primarily lamented the inefficiency of the design. I'm not even sure from that phrasing that implying isn't a paying user, even if they seem to care about people who wouldn't fork the money for the editor.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31734755

[makeitdouble]

Is this a JetBrains commercial account ? Am I at fault for not liking their product that much, and thus not paying them their apparently deserved yearly subscription ?

This feels pretty weird to be faulted for using other companies' products. And no, switching to Jetbrains' doesn't make me more money. Could be the reverse from my past trials.

[philliphaydon]

It's not about liking or not liking a product. You're complaining about pay for a product. If you like a product and its helpful why are you against paying for it?

[makeitdouble]

> If you feel a tool as as much downsides than upsides in your workflow, you don't use it, whatever its price is.

↑ that was in my answer (with the typo, on the “as as” instead of “has as”, my bad)

You might be confounding mine with another comment. I recognize the talent and expertise of JetBrain’s staff, but don’t like their products in general, and use VSCode as a primary editor, and (paid) Textmate for the rest.

To your general point, looking at project like Bitwarden, with their initial kickstarter and their current revenue, I don’t feel like people are restraining from paying for useful software, even when it has a generous free tier.

[xigoi]

You forgot the additional $1000 for a computer powerful enough to run JetBrains.

[philliphaydon]

Sorry I meant to type $1000’s. Corrected it.

I ran JetBrains software on one of those 1.5ghz MacBook 12” and it was totally fine.

I don’t think it needs “powerful” hardware.

Not like visual studio. Now that’s a pain!

[KronisLV]

> I don’t think it needs “powerful” hardware.

That depends. If you have multiple large projects open at the same time, it'll eat a lot of RAM, even if it won't be too CPU intensive.

I run it on a ThinkPad that has 32 GB of RAM, when I have about 6-7 instances of the IDE open and all of these services running locally (generally Java projects, the largest of which is around 4000+ source files), then it gets close to the resource limits.

[philliphaydon]

My ThinkPad with 32GB of ram with 5+ instances of Rider, and DataGrip, VSCode, all open, switching between instances is quick. (checks number of source files for top 3 projects I work on daily) with 4684 files, 10230 files, 7211 files. (no npm junk)

Switching between Visual Studio is 15-20 seconds of wait time while it decides if any files have changed.