I use vscode for my personal projects (c++ and a fully open source stack, compiling for both Linux and Windows).
I’m using the proprietary version of vscode (via the aur) for the plugin repository, but I’ve always envied the open source version…
Are there any tools that have made you excited?
Bonus points if they have some support for compiling with MSVC (or if you can convince me to ditch it for something else).
Right now, the jetbrains IDEs are my favourite because they are proper IDEs, not some editor with a bunch of scripts in a trenchcoat pretending to be an editor. But the company is starting to lose touch with its customers: developers who want an IDE for productivity, not a VS Code lookalike. It’s like the company is finally being taken over by managers who don’t know lick about development and it’s starting to show (at least to me).
Now, I’m on the market for a new editor and even willing to pay, even though I’d prefer paying for an open source IDE. Right now, Zed is looking interesting. The only thing that bothers me is how loud people were about it. Hype destroys my faith in stuff as it’s often just good marketing. Another thing that bugged me is that when they started, they were “Mac first, Linux maybe”. But now that the hype has died down, there’s much less “omg, zed is the new editor and it will be better anything else” type posts, and it supposedly works on Linux, I can give it a try.
Same feeling about Jetbrains. I always upgraded to the latest Pycharm version until now. I actually downgraded from 2025 to 2024, because I don’t like the new UI.
Same. I’m thinking of cancelling my subscription and just sticking with what works. I’m not sure I had a really useful update in a while.
I agree with everything you said about jetbrains. Their vs code like push and AI push has degraded their quality.
Emacs!
With LSPs it works for just about anything and Magit is simply too good.
Emacs with LSP and magit rules!
Magit has changed the workflow of my life.
I switched to Emacs over two years ago because I was getting too comfortable in VS Code. If VS Code didn’t have the “dodgy” stuff, I would recommend it to everyone without reservation.
Emacs has been a pleasant surprise. The latest versions have introduced Eglot (LSP), EditorConfig and a few other odds and ends that make it very close to being usable with very little configuration. My latest suggestion for getting started is JUST two lines of config, and I think you can scale easily.
I just wish Emacs had started from the outset with more common keybindings- it makes it hard to recommend because you need to make a significant investment. I think it’s worthwhile, but still…
However, due to how it’s evolving lately, I suspect it might become even easier to get started with time. If they rolled in to base Emacs automatic LSP installation, that would be huge, for instance.
for some people it’s nice to start from nothing and build up config, I’d recommend doom for anyone else. it’s nice to be given a file with all the settings you can change instead of having to do it all yourself.
I just wish Emacs had started from the outset with more common keybindings- it makes it hard to recommend because you need to make a significant investment. I think it’s worthwhile, but still…
Surely you mean, “I wish Microsoft had adopted the standard Emacs keybindings.”
Neovim
I tried using VSCode because of the copilot integration, but frankly copilot is underwhelming for me. I gave “vibe coding” a shot on a personal project and the results were slower than just doing it myself.
I’m back to neovim. I’m very productive in customizing it and can never go back.
There’s avante.nvim for LLM integration, it supports most if not all LLM vendors at the moment.
I tried it, however, and got to the same conclusion as you. Not worth it.
I found the rough areas did different by model
e.g. Claude could not correct issues it introduced, it would sort of spiral through half refactors for an hour if unchecked.
Gemini Pro asked for way too much permission. “Should I do this?” Yes, go, do it! “Okay, should I now add my edits” Yes. “Okay I added edits, now we can run
make test”, okay run make Gemini requests to run make ugh it’s worse than a bad intern.Gemini would also frequently hallucinate APIs because I used a non-standard api for my hash table (allocate/dereference instead of get/set/update, which I find is more natural for managing ownership). And Gemini would rewrite my code style and order of operations for no reason (eg move a counter increment before updating another field).
At no point could I just point the model at a small problem unsupervised. Even “update the test suite for 100% coverage of this module, make sure the tests are as small in scope as possible” had highly mixed results.
And all models I tried would update my cmakelists and break it, and I hate dealing with cmake.
I’ve been told the new Gemini is good at SQL and programming, but I’m underwhelmed on both. Gemini frequently doesn’t even know all the BigQuery functions, which being integrated into BigQuery Studio it should.
They’re decent at code review, but a language server is still better at catching bugs.
vimUnix is my IDE, vim is my editor.
Lazy Vim is super underrated imo
Used to use vscode, then one day it stopped working for me. I’ve been using Helix full time for a few months now and I’m pretty happy with it.
I used vim for all of my personal stuff until switching to vscode a few years ago, so an editor inspired by neovim is exciting!
Also,
No Electron. No VimScript. No JavaScript.
Hah! Shots fired, I love it
I really want to switch from VSCode to Helix but not having a file tree is a deal breaker.
Luckily there’s been a lot of work on adding a plugin runtime with one of the proof-of-concept plugins being a file tree. Assuming the plugin runtime comes out this year in a helix release, and adding on a year for the community to settle on the first wave of plugins while giving them time to mature, I can see myself using helix fulltime in 2027 (before Microsoft has enshitified vscode enough to be unpleasant to use).
The Unix shell remains an excellent IDE.
A huge array of text- and data-manipulation tools, with more available through the standard package manager in my operating system.
Add in a powerful text editor like Vim or Emacs, and nothing can beat this IDE.
Yep. When everything about your IDE (unix) is programmable, it makes “modern” IDEs seem quite quaint.
Personally I make extensive use of https://f1bonacc1.github.io/process-compose/launcher/ to orchestrate a bunch of different shell scripts that trigger based on file changes (recompiling, restarting servers, re-running tests, etc.). Vim just reads from files as needed. It’s lightning fast, no bloat, and a world-class editing experience.
Zed is definitely my go-to these days. Used to have vscode but the sluggishness just became too much for me. Zed does what vscode did right but faster.
NeoVim. Once I looked at vim as an IDE, I won’t look back
Just wanted to throw Kate into the mix of suggestions…
So this is the image originally posted here somewhere, or was it on reddit, asking about which linux distro was it, and the screenshot (bottom left corner) was from the landing image on the link you posted.
Looks very much like KDE Plasma. Not sure which distro, though.
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no debugger
I use helix editor in the terminal (Technically not an IDE but neither is VSCode). Works great for a keyboard and terminal-centric workflow. I had to configure it a bit to get it where I want but after that I had a blast to write Rust projects in.
It does get a lot of getting used to if you’re not used to vim-like keybinds, and does take memorizing shortcuts
Helix is awesome. I’ve spent many hours these passed months configuring both Sway and Helix to my liking, and it has become joyous to use them together. I prefer Helix’s default configs to vim’s. Still got to use Vim motions a lot though, in Obsidian etc. Similar in many aspects, but there are many small things Helix does which I find more logical. u for undo and U for redo. Small things.
My three IDE’s of choice in order of preference:
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EMacs: ultimative workhorse which can do many more - especially with org-mode (however, time intensive to configure which is why I used also ChatGPT to get it done)
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VSCodium: easy to manage almost anything due to its huge number of extensions
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Vim: don’t know, sometimes I feel the need to work with Vim and it’s many shortcuts
All are free and open source.
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Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA for Java programming, emacs for everything else.
