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.
I switched to Zed from VSCode maybe around 2 years ago and havent looked back.
It’s open source with GPL3 license and has plenty of languages supported via LSP.
If you need AI support they have this natively via the Agents panel and you can also use terminal agents in there BUT if you don’t you can just hide the agents panel and never connect to any account and you never really see any of the AI features. This is essentially what I do for private work where I don’t use AI, and for my job where we are soft-forced to adopt.
Super easy to port over your settings.json from VScode with all your shortcuts etc already.
I tried to switch to Zed at the start of the year but couldn’t Zed’s tabs to work.
It seems like the biggest paper cut preventing users from switching to Zed and they don’t seemed interested in fixing it.
I couldn’t find any settings to fix it.
Were you able to figure it out?
How every program (e.g. editors, browsers, file explorers, etc…) works:
How Zed works:
The default in Zed is
Ctrl + Shift + ]OR[for next or previous tab respectively.If you want to customise it you can do in the keymap editor, it’s called
pane: activate next itemBut that’s what I already have and it doesn’t work properly.
Here’s my minimal test case for a typical mid-work layout:
Now the test:
The tab switching is stuck switching only the tabs in that pane, counter to the way every other tabbed program works.
Holding Ctrl + Tab should cycle through every tab.
Maybe the keymap setting isn’t correct? e.g. maybe you put it in the wrong context?
I remember seeing Zed a while back and them heavily promoting the AI capabilities. I’ll give it a try to see if it’s built upon a solid base and works well without the AI stuff. There are features in Jetbrains IDEs that I’m quite fond of like cross-file refactoring, proper debuggers, (up until recently) the docker integration, and their database browser. Hopefully at least cross-file refactoring and debugging is available.
Thanks for pointing it out.
Seconding the Gram recommendation (it is actively maintained and configs are nearly entirely interoperable between Zed & Gram, so if Gram gets abandoned it’d be easy to switch to Zed), though I will also point out that Zed has a single toggle for all AI features. You can just disable that and no AI. It stays disabled too, unlike with JetBrains which I found would periodically re-enable AI features I’d disabled…
might want to check gram editor
A fork of Zed without AI, I see. I’ll need to look at how active it is. Forking is easy, maintaining is hard.
Thanks for the suggestion.