New UI

1. It is planned to stop supporting Classic UI at some point because maintaining two different UI versions takes many resources. Stopping support is not planned until we address most NewUI UX issues.
2. As the IntelliJ Platform is open-source, it is clear that Classic UI will always be available by at least some means.
3. JetBrains plains ahead for a year. In 2024, it is not planned to remove Classic UI entirely. However, it could become an optional plugin.

Thank you. 

>2. As the IntelliJ Platform is open-source, it is clear that Classic UI will always be available by at least some means.
 

I scoped this out early on and decided it was too undocumented. At some point, the documentation just stopped, with a note from Dmitri Jemerov I think it was, that “more would come later”. That was 10 years  or more ago, and nothing came.  

I was keenly interested for a while, but after persisting and reading the forum I realized it would  essentially constitute  a second job for me to try to master it so I could build a reliable product or plugin.  Then there's always the risk that IJ will change everything out from under you and all your knowledge transforms into sunk cost / decreasing benefit.  An example of that specific  scenario is, possibly,  what's happening now with the new UI. What kind of burden will that be to plugin devs?    Overall, you don't  want to be at the end of another man's leash if you have a choice. 

I will stop my sub when I can no longer use the old UI on a new version I imagine, and just roll on with the old version I have, which is fine. TTTT, IJ has barely improved for me in a decade or more. You stopped being interested in the type of innovation you were known for and went into, I don't know , synthetic biology or something. That's where the money (and brains) goes, as they say. Almost nothing wrt to editing has improved or been really new in a loooong looong time; just here and there a few things. It's as though you thought that problem was solved. I disagree. I'd share my thoughts (I'm up to 500 + features I'd like to see implemented in a running list I started some years ago) because IJ is truly great at taking in feedback but if you think anything's going to come of that feedback other than a bug fix, well, foe-gheddah-bowt-it. You guys are the Fab Four and if anyone thinks there a place for a fifth Beatle … yeah, no. Go write your own IDE.  

At any rate, your real interests lay beyond the IDE horizon now I sense, which is your right certainly, you have to keep it fresh for yourselves, have something incredible to dream about making and IDEs is probably not a inexhaustible  source of excitement for devs.

We'll see how it goes. I have to say I sensed a shift in JB's priorities and, from my POV you are now acting like all companies act when they get too big , too successful , too old and have too much money. They're bored with their core competency. They stop serving their customers, stop listening to them and start dictating to them. They start chasing just plain weird ideas with all earnestness. 

It's like being in a marriage where one spouse has lost all interest in the other, stops talking to them, stops trying to sincerely relate, takes up other interests and figures the other spouse can lump it or leave it. It's not a great feeling, but I've felt it coming out of  IJ for about 7 or 8 years now, maybe longer.   In my mind, this  just confirms what I knew I knew. 

We're probably headed for a divorce. 

I am sad.  

The new UI is causing me issues using the IDE efficently. Please bring back the expanded menus at least.

Maybe you have, not sure, the settings are a mess, unfortunally.

Now the “use old UI” checkbox seems to have disappeared, it caused me to get here out of frustration.

Hi Christoph, can you list the issues that you are having with the new UI here so that I can address them?

Please also provide more details about the problem with the menus. Are you referring to main menu?

pretty much prefer to have it there, stay there even I click outside app focus.

I am aware of the “have it in a seperate toolbar” which leaves me with two bars instead one.

Maybe this can be changed, maybe not, this is my way of asking how. 

I mean, what is getting saved here? nothing, I need to move the mouse more and do more clicks

for the same goal. And dare you you had to check on something on the other display/window… well thx

also

Please upvote issue IJPL-43725 (allow the main menu be always expanded)

Nadia Tarashkevich  Arina Efremova please Jetbrains, just listen to your user base.

This IDE was clearly intended for power users, a lot of us just fell in love with the UI when we discovered JB products, this was so cleverly designed. Obviously designed by devs for devs. The topmost of what's available.

I personally even pushed hard in all the companies i worked in for them to switch to IntelliJ Ultimate, showing them how clear, easy to use and powerful it is. 

Please, just listen to us who use it 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, expanded on 6 screens at once, carefully customized its UI and settings over the years…

I feel like a love story is about to end and it makes me (and a lot of others) really sad.

Thanks for reading, at least.

Hi Blambert-ext - thanks for your feedback.

We do try to listen to each and every user that comes to us. Yes, the new UI did changed its appearance, and many things are no longer visible by default. But you can change that. We are trying to make the new UI as customizable as possible so that our users can still keep everything that was dear to them in the old UI, while at the same time introducing a modern base for new features that can be supported and improved for years to come.

So if you have a particular gripe with the new UI's features, do let us know so that we can address the problem: be it usability, aesthetics, lack of something, etc. We will check our existing tasks and feature requests and either submit new ones or actualize the status of the existing ones so that your feedback actually counts.

Hi Arina Efremova  

Maybe a feature to “re-customize” the new UI to look -exactly- like the old one would be nice and stop a lot of complaints ?

A lot of devs don't want an Instagram-like IDE but just having all at once in a glance.

Thanks for your answer :)

Blambert-ext 

From my experience, people tend to dislike the new UI until they actually work with it a little. When they try to adjust it to fit their needs, they discover that it has almost all of the features of the old UI (and lots of additional feature requests in progress). 

New UI has come a long way from the initial design introduced over a year ago. It now has a compact mode to make borders thinner and icons smaller so that more data fits on the screen; text labels for tool windows; fully customizable top toolbar to put all of your frequently used buttons on; different ways to show and hide the main menu, better distinguish between open projects, etc. That's why we always ask users who are not satisfied with it to provide a few examples of what functionality is lacking in their opinion so that we can improve it. Some of the improvements are already work in progress and may appear in the IDE in one of the upcoming versions.

Custom UI themes can still be applied via plugins, and if you want, you can still use the actual old UI in versions up to and including 2024.1.4 by enabling the ide.experimental.ui option in IDE registry. Even in versions 2024.2+, you can still enable the separately installed  ‘Classic UI’ plugin to get the old look back. However, we are hopeful that more users will adopt the new UI and help us make it better by pointing out its weaker sides.

May I correct you? “people tend to dislike new” things - if they had a habit with something that just worked :)

I really have to try to get used to those icon ish looking things where an extra translation to what the icon does needs to happen.

Any way to not use the icon but simply having the text?

Like when adding Git to the menu it uses a default Icon, do I need to create one with a text in it now to be able to read what it means?

No “show text instead of icon” option? If not, this is utter garbage. tbh

There is an implemented option “Show tool window names” 
 

You are welcome to share your feedback in the similar ticket that we consider for implementation: replace icons by text in the main toolbar (https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IJPL-157755/Add-text-to-main-toolbar-buttons)

Nadia Tarashkevich  it could be nice to have some sort of system that, on a button click, replicates the actual user UI configuration (including windows/panels positions and sizes, custom toolbars, etc) to the new UI as of it would look like almost nothing happened. You would get A LOT less complaints :)