intellij lite

Can you somehow describe this "lite" version in terms of feature packaging?

Best regards,

Eugene Belyaev
President, CTO
JetBrains, Inc
http://www.jetbrains.com

"Develop with pleasure!"

i was wondering if there will be plans to make an "lite" version of
intellij.. or even making more core features into plugins. this way,
we have the choice of turning them off to save system resources.

thanks

In article <unit-065135408632434155730904642@news.intellij.net>,
Eugene Belyaev <beg@jetbrains.com> wrote:

Can you somehow describe this "lite" version in terms of feature packaging?

Since you asked, although not me, I want to take the opportunity to butt
in and say to me that would mean:

If Free:
Editor
Code completion
Debugger

If a little more money than free but not full blown:
Refactoring

Then full rev.

R

+1.

I think these are good ideas to attract pple to IDEA. Most developers are developing withOUT pleasure and they are not aware of it. First u need to let them know what is "pleasure" :)

How exactly would that attract any kind of people Jetbrains would want attracted? If you want to sell licenses so that you can continue putting out an excellent product, how is giving parts of it away for free going to help that? That only leeds to a huge hang-around crowd that sticks to the free variation.

Suppose that would move a few ahats away from Eclipse though. :)

-1

Since you asked, although not me, I want to take the opportunity to
butt in and say to me that would mean:

If Free:
Editor
Code completion
Debugger
If a little more money than free but not full blown: Refactoring

IMHO, this would be a bad move, for JetBrains and for us who use IDEA:
Eclipse is growing very fast. If you strip out features from Idea than the
difference between the two will be even smaller, so people will have even
less reasons to change the IDE.
What's worst: a lot of people will compare only the "lite" version in reviews.
The same thing is happening with IBM's WSAD (Eclipse with IBMs nice commercial
plug-ins). People always compare JBuilder and Idea with Eclipse, and not
with WSAD. Well, that's bad for IBM, but they are a HUGE company, so the
IDE business it's not that vital like for JetBrains.
The same thing will happen with IDEA if they make a "lite" version, but AFAIK
for JetBrains the IDE business is vital.

Ahmed.

I think IDEA needs mindshare right now. Many people don't realize how much
Eclipse sucks for most things; I think people think Eclipse was developed
by gods and nothing could be better.

-Keith

How exactly would that attract any kind of people Jetbrains would want
attracted? If you want to sell licenses so that you can continue
putting out an excellent product, how is giving parts of it away for
free going to help that? That only leeds to a huge hang-around crowd
that sticks to the free variation.

Suppose that would move a few ahats away from Eclipse though. :)

IMHO, this would be a bad move, for JetBrains and for us who use IDEA:
Eclipse is growing very fast. If you strip out features from Idea than
the
difference between the two will be even smaller, so people will have
even
less reasons to change the IDE.
What's worst: a lot of people will compare only the "lite" version in
reviews.
The same thing is happening with IBM's WSAD (Eclipse with IBMs nice
commercial
plug-ins). People always compare JBuilder and Idea with Eclipse, and
not
with WSAD. Well, that's bad for IBM, but they are a HUGE company, so
the
IDE business it's not that vital like for JetBrains.
The same thing will happen with IDEA if they make a "lite" version,
but AFAIK
for JetBrains the IDE business is vital.
Ahmed.

I think if there were a free version, it would have to be better than Eclipse
in almost every way, which would mean adding almost every feature to the
free version. This is because Eclipse and IDEA offer similar features, but
IDEA implements them better, more intuitively, more efficiently. JetBrains
couldn't just release a free version with fewer of IDEA's components, because
IDEA doesn't have too many components that Eclipse doesn't have. It's the
quality of the components (keybindings, refactorings, intentions) that makes
IDEA so cool.

I think that if JetBrains could come up with a way to release a free version,
it would be very good for IDEA mindshare, but it would be hard to do it right,
and maybe impossible.

Hello Eugene,

EB> Can you somehow describe this "lite" version in terms of feature
EB> packaging?

Commander -> Plugin
External tools -> Plugin
TODO -> Plugin
Ant -> Plugin
GUI Designer -> Plugin
Resource Links -> Plugin

And also (as JTogether) is it planned for run modes J2EE Developer/Web Developer/Swing
Developer/J2ME Developer? Each of them is just set of activated plugins.

Thanks!
--
Alexey Efimov, Java Developer
Tops BI
http://www.topsbi.ru

In article <151680632435020456372992@news.jetbrains.com>,
Keith Lea <keith@cs.oswego.edu> wrote:

I think IDEA needs mindshare right now. Many people don't realize how much
Eclipse sucks for most things; I think people think Eclipse was developed
by gods and nothing could be better.

That's because compared the netbeans, it is :)

That said, it's not matching eclipse one for one, you'd never use
everything in eclipse just like you'd never use everything in idea. The
trick is to put enough of the major things people use, and let them play
and drool and get them to buy a little more to get refactoring. For
example you'd pay $99.00 for the Refactoring version, $99.00 would be
less than you'd spend if you bought a bunch of quality eclipse plugins.

Mindshare is not necessarily a good thing... you end up with a support
nightmare and a bunch of nut jobs on EAP (although it's too late to save
that one :) )

R

Hi guys,

I'll explain my case, jump to the last lines for the important part. Maybe it's useful to understand when a LITE version would be useful, and why.

I love IntelliJ, once I started to use it 4 years ago, I never swapped to anything else. I don't remember a day after the first installation, that I wasn't saying: "Oh my God! This is amazingly smart!"
I'm still surprised sometime, when I discover a new function. There are plenty of them, that are making code developing a pleasure, as someone else said.
I agree, It's exactly what an IDE should be: it packs all the tools that a developer need, to start coding in a little time, without having to search external tools o extensions. If you want you can push your settings on a remote repository, and share them with any other computer that you use.
Another good strategy to develop during time the perfect configuration to suit your needs.
When you make a fresh install another machine, you can pull the settings and in a matter of minutes, the setup is ready again.

Ok, so coming back to the purpose of a LITE version, let me explain the situation:
Most of the time I'm coding on my main desktop computer, which is a good machine, i7, 16Gb of ram, nvm SSD... no problem at all with this setup.
I have another laptop, a smaller one, not very suited for intensive development. Yes, I know, development must be done on computers with the right specs.

If you download PhpStorm or IntelliJ, or Android Studio (what I've used), you can swap them with no issue: the features are almost the same.

So let's think about a IntelliJ Lite version which haves the wonderful code navigation & refactoring, version control, run configurations, maven & gradle support, node & npm support.
Then remove all the features shared with PhpStorm or similar products, leaving only syntax highlighting. No server configurations, intellisense, etc.
It must work only with Java or Javascript.

Obviously the work must be rewarded by a good ram saving. Reaching a minimum of 1Gb and a maximum of 2-3Gb for recommended, of Ram, would make the IDE usable also on medium level hardware, allowing people to work efficently also when they're not at the usual workplace.
Things are changing, now that contanerization is getting common, even more ram is required.

I've downloaded VSCode for the 10th time, trying to find a satisfying enough configuration; as usal the extension's search is beginned, I will loose my day or two setting up things, and finally I will uninstall it as usual, going back to my loved one. 

Jetbrains products are different, nearly perfect piece of softwares, made with praticity in mind. Not a puzzle of random functions!

EDIT: Why not making a modular IDE, with one module for each supportble language.
Example: I use IntelliJ, then I can disable Php support, Python support.
This way I can tailor the IDE, depending on project needs.
Instead of downloading PyCharm, PhpStorm, IntelliJ, I would download only the core, with optional modules, downloadable apart.
Even better: assign to each project one or more language modules, having them loaded depending on the project setup (auto-revealed, or manual).
Would be also possible to load the right module when swapping  from a folder to another, in the same project.

Thanks for reading... I hope that one day this would become reality!

Federico, this describes my feelings exactly. VS code feels really snappy. I'm still a die hard IntelliJ fan, but my MBP 2015 with 16GB of ram struggles to keep up sometimes. Of course, it's also the fault of the dart analyzer, but I've never seen IntelliJ run faster than VScode has. I would love the ability to turn off or remove some of the features I don't use. For example, I'm a dart developer, so I don't really need all the Java features. I don't know if they have an impact or not, but I do know that my IDE runs out of memory even when  4096MB are allocated

> I've never seen IntelliJ run faster than VScode has

There is LightEdit mode in IntelliJ IDEA which is as fast as simple text editor. See https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2020/04/lightedit-mode/

>  I would love the ability to turn off or remove some of the features I don't use.

You can disable any bundled plugins to make the interface lighter, but it does not have much influence on performance. 

I suppose the "Out of memory" is caused by a bug/performance issue. So, please report such a case to YouTack describing the performed steps, your project structure, and providing logs folder: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/newIssue?project=IDEA

Jwhite consider that IntelliJ is a Java application, while Code I think that is based upon Electron or similar. Java applications are heavier on system resources, you can try to do a clean install and see if runs better, or check memory settings from IntelliJ.
4096 it's too much, I've got it running now with ~1GB of memory consumption. It may depend on your installed plugins. Hope that this helps

FWIW I wrote a script that downloads a lite and "minimal" IntelliJ IDEA Community distro, for those of you who (like me) prefer not to download (and then disable) so much of unnecessary bulk - Android, Kotlin, built-in Maven, etc.

Have been using its generated 2021.1 bundle for nearly 2 months now, with pretty good results (just a few background errors here and there - most of them avoidable by relaxing a few JARs). Generated 2021.3 just 3 days ago, and it's been running even more smoothly (no errors so far!)

The generated bundle is approx. 1/3 of the size of the original. You can change what plugins etc to include/exclude, using two path/file lists; and also feed in an old IDEA bundle if you already have one on disk, to reuse and skip download of any unchanged components.

Much more optimizations are possible (e.g. pull in third party JARs from the local Maven/Gradle cache, enable partial download of platform-impl.jar which constitutes most of the download size, etc.). I will try to continue to improve the script as I get the opportunity.

Currently the download whitelist and blacklist are optimized for IDEA 2021.1; with those configs I got a ~180M download and ~210M bundle size for 2021.3. Probably it's possible to shave off more from 2021.3, by having a look at the dry-run output and updating the file lists accordingly.