Why do you want to ruin everything with new UI?

@... no no, the classic UI is still there, you can safely do the update. JB claims to remove it after version 2024.2, or at least they will stop supporting it.

Classic UI will not be removed in 2024.*

Just want to say that I will rather switch to Eclipse than be obligated to use a crap which was initially designed as a lightweight code editor for newbies and newcomers.

re: the post by https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/profiles/14954856217106-Thomas-Vanhelden

I would observe that the lines between the panels are a single pixel thick and finding that pixel to click on and drag is often like playing a video game you're not very good at.  Also, they're gray to the point of being white, like the background.

My 2 cents. 

You should listen to your customer-base, guys. Don't get budlight-mode and think you are smarter than the people giving their money to you. Making it look like VS code is exactly the opposite of why we are willing to pay for IntelliJ licenses.

Should effort be paid on something, in my opinion as a customer, is multi-language and keep improving remoting. That's your weakness as a product compared to vs code. That's it. Anything else de-naturalizes the reason why we buy IntelliJ products.

PS: You need to do something about your  remoting dev team. I've never seen such a prolific production of bugs, ever, in IntelliJ's history. There's clearly somethign wrong there.

I see that JetBrains is moving towards a completely unnecessary minimalist trend. Even if the new UI works well and without errors, the distaste for this new interface will continue, and may even increase. I see on forums that programmers are organizing to migrate to other development platforms, stop renewing their licenses and encourage their companies to drop JetBrains products.
My suggestion is that you listen more to your users, really respect them and don't impose changes.

2007185 where are people discussing this? Do you have a link? 

I landed here because a minor update today (2023.3.4) completely wrecked my UI by switching to the new version without asking for permission. For a moment I was really confused, WTAF, did I launch VSCode by accident, it's so unrecognizable. I know this comment will be ignored, just like many other companies ignore loyal customers, but it's just one more voice of “can we PLEASE stop with the dumbification of the world”? The old UI already has all that's necessary to move away the clutter you don't need. But it also allows you to set things up in an efficient manner, with exactly what you need right there.
And yes, yes, sure, for now I can still switch back - but for how long? The old UI gives me exactly what I want, at my fingertrips and glance of an eye. I look towards certain areas and click some of the tools probably tens if not hundreds of times a day. I still hate the change on Commit dialog and taking away the immediate view of my current changes in Git tab, and I have to keep reverting it because every now and again update makes it go back to this new stupid default. Making what I need 5 clicks away instead of 1, or only available on hover rather than immediately visible at all times, or everything switching to dumb icons instead of simple text, is NOT simplifying my life or improving my experience.
I am truly dreading the day when JetBrains fully decommisions the old UI. As others said, if what's out there is unrecognizable from  dumbed-down VSCode and behaves like it, even though I hate it, I may just as well not-pay-for-IntelliJ-and-use-VSCode-and-still-hate-it. Or just cancel subscription and keep using the last version before the old UI goes away, for free.
Really sad to see this trend of “treat your customers as idiots with no attention span” reached JetBrains as well.

Liliana Ziolek hello and welcome to our small but very stubborn club, which existence is known by Jetbrains, but I'm not sure they care much. If they will not give you a meaningful answer (I'm a pessimist about them since this issue had arised) at least I can sympathize with you, having experienced the same shock from what I saw in the pew UI.

So I guess short story, just objectively descriptive and without sentiment or opinion: we, the long time license-paying customers who pay for the classic JB IDE we like, just  don't make a critical mass enough to be taken into account in whatever long term strategies assessment or the company is more interested in things other than making money. Whatever the case is, classic UI won't stand beyond 2024 and that's it. There's no point on keep discussing. Just a decision to make of whether to keep sending your money to a company that's focusing on something else that's not what you are interested in or not. 

May be the problem is we don't know what that focus is. We are just discussing the debris already. May be you guys can advertise what the reasons and assessments behind the decision are? You are not obligated, of course. This is not a public service nor a human right. But may be you convince someone, that otherwise wouldn't, to keep buying.

Just to simplify with an example: you have a bunch of customers that have been paying for espresso and you decided to start delivering chai latte to them. That's the situation. Whether the amount of such customers is relevant for your business or not, beyond my visibility. I just happen to be one of them.

Regards

I don't think we are the stubborn ones Kivan-Mih. We just want to get the product we were paying for and to decide how to spend our precious time while keeping our minds focused in our work rather than in dealing with a changing context before our eyes we didn't ask for.  I think we all but JB provided good reasons for our case here. So I guess you are right, they just don't care, we are not meaningful enough.

Gabriel Moreno Brc  “There's no point on keep discussing.” 
There obviously is a point. I think our efforts at least show Jetbrains what they have to be ready for when they remove the old UI entirely. And it will be a lot of pain not only for us ordinary developers, but for Jetbrains as well. I think its reputation will be under heavy attack. I'm not sure will they like it to happen next year or the year after or maybe…never. Since Jetbrains AI copilot is not that perfect overall and is worse than MS have, and because it's all the rage now, maybe they will want to focus on it and deal with it first rather than getting the reputation strike from another direction which they control better. For us ordinary developers it will be beneficial if they will postpone the old UI removal due circumstances like this.

I want you to be right Ivan Khodyrev. It's just looking at their answers they are telling us pretty much, again and again: “we know what's better for you more than what you do, we'll do it whether you like it or not, if you don't like it you have until end of 2024 to go somewhere else”.

My only hope is we are talking to a layer in the organization that's totally disconnected from reality, acting like they've got a scholarship to do whatever they think is cool, and at some point someone above gets the noise and freaks out. In that regard you may be right and is worth to keep going. It's just it's been a while (and not just in this topic, you can track this “mood” in other support topics and incidents) and I have to conclude there's no such disconnection and this is a decision made by people actually running the thing in full awareness of their decision. 

Some time ago I posted a new topic in the hope of refreshing the issue and contributing to that noise. Check the answer. Not sure whether to find it hilarious or sad. https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/16214113308690-New-UI-vs-classic-UI?page=1#community_comment_16237384038418

Great companies eventually turn bad as the founders that had the original vision leave. It's an inevitable thing. This happened with Apple, Boeing, with the Windows division at Microsoft, with the big banks, the list goes on. We can see it's now happened with Jetbrains. It's pretty obvious some sort of major internal shuffle occurred, I don't know what or how, but it's obvious. The new Jetbrains hasn't got a clue what we're talking about, so rather than trying to explain things to them all we must do is it accept that the only thing that remains from Jetbrains is the logo/brand. 

I don't know about anyone else but the IDE seems nearly unusable as of late. Rider is so full of bugs now I must hard restart it multiple times a day to get rid of them, too numerous to list. They tell us to file bug reports. The Jetbrains of old would have just released non-buggy, properly tested, functional software. I feel it's over. The alternative now is to embrace the dumbed down VS Code it seems, perhaps give up static typing, debugging, unit testing, in favor of “simple YOLO” languages like javascript (even for the backend), and employ anti-patterns whilst billing high hourly rates for CTOs that cannot code. Software as an industry is taking a step backward, embracing bugs and standing on its head whilst screaming “look, its so minimalist, how cool!”. The cycle will repeat itself over the next several decades. A new generation of coders must learn things the hard way before lessons of old are appreciated again. Jetbrains is now pivoting and marketing itself toward this newfound crowd since that's where the money now is, and dare I say, that crowd seems to have even infiltrated Jetbrains management itself.

Quite simply, as other commenters have alluded to, we are no longer relevant. We are a loud minority that will not even be a drop in the ocean when we leave, despite how much we wish we'd make an impact when we do - we won't. We're just not that important.

Heronww “We are a loud minority that will not even be a drop in the ocean when we leave,”
I'm pretty sure you are wrong. Most of JB userbase come from 2000's, 2010's when it was the best IDE out there at least for Java and later for other things. When Atom and then VS Code started to rise the JB share of obtaining new users began to drop and obviously this trend goes forward nowadays. New UI is one of the things they try to do to break the trend. The problem is - that huge userbase, which is mostly silent who love JB products for what they were, in their majority do not like the new UI approach. When no one touches them, they are silent, e.g. among my colleagues not everyone knows that there is new UI at all and if someone knows and tried, usually he switched back and prefer just to forget about it. But when JB will do the final switch and make new UI mandatory for everyone, I'm sure it will be a boom. 

Ivan Khodyrev I hope you're right and I'm wrong, and whoever was behind the new UI decision is put in a position of.. less responsibility. I guess we will see when the transition becomes mandatory.

I posted in June last year and  have recently discontinued my subscription of Webstorm. Actions speak louder than words for me. 

What's funny is Jetbrains have a promotional video up on Youtube for the new UI (type in ‘Webstorm new UI' into Youtube to view), where they're using the age-old marketing technique of “sex sells”… they have an attractive lady (by western standards) talking about how great and amazing the new Webstorm UI is. I laughed when I watched it and left a comment about how I disagreed and thought it was a rip off of VS Code etc but my comment got removed immediately.

Good luck people and I wish you success with whichever tool you decide on using moving forward.

I really don't mind the new-UI, but the show-stopper for me is the very needless swap of the file breadcrumb and branch stuff top to bottom.
The file bread-crumb should be at the top, on top of the file tabs. I want to know the path of the file I am on more times in a day than I want to know what branch I am on. I don't get why you would deliberately make this harder for a developer to grok.

See: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IJPL-148765/New-UI-file-breadcrumb-location-is-a-bad-move

Iyobo Eki both navbar and git branch positions can be customized, answered you in the issue tracker.

I already contributed my input through IDEA on the new UI. 

But I really was wondering, what is the main motivation for the new UI? Benefits are more like none, besides of course some icons.

 The only real reason I could think of, is that the company would like to migrate to some new UI technology because it provides more features, which could be running IDEA in the cloud and displaying in the browser or maybe that the current technology, which is used to build the classic is depracated and won't get any updates.   

What is the real reason? Help please us understand.

Ekaterina Valeeva  Nadia Tarashkevich  Yaroslav Bedrov 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.

A good solution could be to add some system that would take the old UI settings and customize the new one in the same way (if it is possible) ? This would solve a lot of complaints.

Thanks for reading, at least.

We value our customers’ feedback and continuously work to balance the introduction of new features and UI improvements with the habits and accustomization of our users. The world is changing, and to keep innovation and move forward, some changes have to be made. We respect and listen to our users and are very grateful for your constructive feedback and criticism. Actually, the feedback we got on the new UI greatly helped us make the new UI better – we fixed more than 2,000 bugs and made many improvements. We will continue to evaluate the feedback on the new UI and decide how long we will continue to support the classic UI. You can find some more details in a dedicated blog post. 

Thank you for your continued loyalty and your feedback 🙌

Great! Andrey Dernov thank you that since now you started to listen to us, we greatly appreciate it! So if it's the case, please leave old UI in any form you like (plugin or part of the base package) for as long as the Idea product exists. I'm sure many people will tell you: “Thank you”. 

We will continue to evaluate the feedback on the new UI and decide how long we will continue to support the classic UI.

I hope the feedback being continually receive here, keeps the team motivated to keep the classic ui around indefinitely, and acknowledge its not something to get rid off, since this thread apparently exists just for this.

Anyway, even if its as a plugin,  it serves its purpose, we don't mind.
So, a Thank you from my side as well, for listening to your users's.
 

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/07/08/the-new-ui-becomes-the-default-in-2024-2/

How long will we continue to support the old UI?

The classic UI is available as a plugin in JetBrains Marketplace. Starting with the 2024.2 version, you will see a popup with the link to the plugin, or you can find the plugin in Settings | Plugins.

We plan to support the plugin for at least one year, which means that we will test and release it with every major IDE release. We will evaluate the new UI adoption rate and feedback, and based on this information, we will decide how long we will continue to support the classic UI.

Unfortunately, the Classic UI plugin won’t work correctly with Gateway and when running the IDEs remotely.

Combined with the regression of Jetbrains IDE in the last couple of years, especially the plethora of new bugs in 2024.1, a lot of users will now be forced to find a new IDE due to this commitment from jetbrains to migrate to the new UI. VS 2022 is the standard competitor which whilst not as good, is at least free, and not as hideous looking as VS Code/new IntelliJ UI.

We will continue to evaluate the feedback on the new UI and decide how long we will continue to support the classic UI

As long as you wanna be paid.

After six months of use, I can say that the new one is better. You can delete the old one.

Anything can be better at something. The question is at what and is it what you prioritize over what is not.

Gedsim you have just proved, that humans are very adaptable creatures. The problem is not that we all will die with the new UI, but rather how JB treats its user base. For many years we thought that we are the first priority for them. Well it's not the case anymore. So many people even if you read comments in this topic decided to adapt to something else rather than wait surprises from JB in the future, which is quite reasonable when faith in something dies.