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 used to be a JetBrains user for a long time. I now use Gram, a really nice fork of Zed that strips out features that some users may find unsavoury (AI integration, GitHub integration). I don’t deeply care about an editor including these features, but I don’t use them, so they’re unnecessary bloat to me. Gram lets you set a base keymap to be most similar to another editor/IDE you might be used to, and this includes a JetBrains keymap, which is what I use.
If you want the whole AI integration stuff, just use upstream Zed. It’s more or less otherwise the same from an end user perspective.
You might dislike it for being too VSCode-y insofar as it’s closer to a lightweight editor than to a full IDE like JetBrains products. I would like it if it were more fully featured and felt more like a full IDE, but it works for my purposes, and it is way more responsive thanks to running natively rather than being a JVM program. It’s not a RAM hog like JetBrains IDEs either.
It’s worth noting that there’s a single toggle that, to my knowledge, turns off all AI features in Zed. So if you do not object to the presence of this functionality, but simply do not want to use it, then you’re probably better off just sticking with upstream.
However, I’m not sure what you mean by “GitHub integration”, so that may not be covered. If you simply mean Copilot support, then that is also disabled by the aforementioned toggle
I just checked out Gram and it looks pretty decent for what I like to do. Thanks for mentioning it!