As much as I love Kotlin and have a great deal of respect for JetBrains, I’ve always preferred the other Java IDEs over IntelliJ. The fact that choosing Kotlin—which I genuinely do prefer—effectively locks you into IntelliJ for the foreseeable future has been one of the main reasons I’ve hesitated to recommend it unreservedly for every project.
Just to be clear: I think IntelliJ and the rest of JetBrains’ tools are excellent and absolutely worth the price. I simply happen to prefer the alternatives—and they happen to be free. That said, I realise this is very much a personal preference, and one that most others don’t seem to share.
NetBeans was my go-to IDE until I started working with Kotlin, which more or less forced me over to IntelliJ. I’ve also tried VSCode on some pure Java/Maven projects since then, and found that it shares some of that same feel—more lightweight and direct, which I’ve always quite liked.
This is amazing news. The inability to write Kotlin in emacs was the only thing stopping me from using the language.
I really hope that this means that we can some day get a Jetbrains Java LSP. I would pay for an Intellij Ultimate subscription just to get access to such a thing.
I currently rock a setup, as a Java dev, where I do as much as I can in emacs but have a binding to jump to the current line in Intellij. I find myself switching between the 2 without too much friction. It's mostly just committing in Intellij and having pre-commit checks analyze my changes.
Not original poster, but I will say that I specifically love Doom emacs.
It is really easy to navigate only from the keyboard. It uses vim-style keybindings for everything, so you don't have to do all the weird hand contortions that happen a more traditional emacs-style interface. When you do access functions, they are handled with multi-keystroke gestures while you're in command mode. The keystrokes are effectively navigating through a menu tree. There's a minibuffer at the bottom of the screen to help you navigate, so you don't have to rote memorize everything, but anything you do use often enough to memorize can be accessed in 2-4 keystrokes.
Some of the plugins are just amazing. Projectile - a project management and navigation sidebar - has really good ergonomics compared to what I'm used to with graphical IDEs. Magit is a fantastic and powerful git interface, and the only in-editor git interface I'll actually use; in any other IDE I'll just use git from the command line.
I've got to mention orgmode, of course. I'm not sure I can articulate why I like it so much; it's kind of like a vi-style editor interface where it's hard to grok without putting in some time, but those who do put in the time tend to fall in love.
I will agree that emacs's language support is spotty compared to vscode, but in this day and age that's true of any editor that isn't vscode. And it also lacks that really deep melding with the language that you get with IDEs that are all-in on one platform like IntelliJ IDEA and Visual Studio. But in general it's kind of an outlier in terms of popularity-to-polish ratio.
Perhaps its better to say there is very little "out of the box" wrt language support, but otherwise I am not quite sure what you mean for >90% of situations. Eglot + the right lsp server gets you really far these days.
I think it’s admirable that there’s a generic language server for Kotlin. Others, such as zed can benefit from this as well.
That said, I would much rather use AndroidStudio for Kotlin. Hands down. I use VSCode only when I can’t find something better. I recently switched my Elixir dev to Zed and am happy with that. Pretty much only thing I choose to use VSCode for these days is my ansible setups. Otherwise:
- Pycharm -> Python
- Xcode -> Swift
- Android Studio -> Kotlin
- Zed for Elixir/Phoenix
- Nova for embedded C code
- vim for scripts and quick edits of any of the above
VSCode for everything is like using a multitool to do woodworking in a garage. When you’re hiking or on a trip, a lightweight do it all tool has advantages. But I think it’s important to remember what IDE stands for.
On a different perspective, I love that VS Code supports so many things. As full stack dev I have to work with Python/TypeScript/C# interchangeably, often in the same project. I can easily switch between projects with the same editor window, and I get to use the same keybinds.
That is nice, but not much different from jetbrains IDEs that can do this as well?
The issue with the VSCode ecosystem is that extensions can conflict, die, etc, and that is very annoying when setting up environments takes a long time, IMO.
I've been using CLion since 2017. I recently switched to Helix, and one of the refreshing things about this has been that I'm now in an editor that can seamlessly handle every language or text file type. I think switching between editors was slowing me down and causing friction.
With Jetbrains, while there are plugins for other languages, it's hit and miss in my experience. Managing multiple IDE's was simply annoying, even things such as ensuring your settings are synced across everything was an issue. A different editor per language feels like a decision made for business needs and not user needs.
Which isn't to say that their IDE's are bad or anything, they are good. But they would be a lot better if they didn't take their product and split it up for each mainstream language.
Such as IntelliJ Ultimate that doesn’t have C++ integration, or CLion that can’t have Ruby integration or dozens of other combinations that happen in the field but not possible in IntelliJ.
Neither does VSCode. They are extensions, which are analogous to plugins in the JetBrains ecosystem. Although, it seems like there used to be way more plugin authors for language support pre-vscode/atom/sublime-text.
You can use the JetBrains launcher to switch between projects in another JetBrains IDE though. Also, I think you can do single window mode in Ultimate to do a lot.
> The integration with the Language Server Protocol is created as an extension to the commercial IntelliJ-based IDEs. Therefore, plugins using Language Server integration are not available in JetBrains products like IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition and Android Studio from Google.
b) I thought IntelliJ code analysis is so much more superior? If you’re using LSP, what’s the point of IntelliJ anyway? Sluggish ui?
It's so that you can do the "all languages in one IDE" thing you just described by using the LSP for languages IntelliJ Ultimate doesn't support. The experience will be more or less identical to VSCode for LSP languages, but for those supported by IntelliJ, it'll be better.
I've pretty much replaced my Sublime Text usage with Zed as a general purpose editor, which handles any edits that last longer than i can be bothered to edit stuff in Vim. I've used Vi(m) for decades, and know my way around, and while it's a decent editor, it is NOT and IDE, and modern features feels like they're tacked on.
With the proliferation of JS, TS, Python, Go, etc, Kotlin is probably not even a thought for many young developers. Any efforts by JetBrains to bring Kotlin to where the people are at (as opposed to expecting people to come to IntelliJ) is welcomed. Call me a stan, whatever, but Kotlin is the best, most productive language I've ever used, by far. Yes, it takes some effort to understand how to effectively utilize some of its features, but once you do, productivity (and enjoyment) elevates tremendously.
Kotlin dominates Android development, but Android Studio is free. Google has become more and more hostile towards indie Play Store developers, so in 2025 it is more risky and less lucrative. Kotlin's "home turf" (Android) may be losing developers faster faster than Jetbrains can gain them on other platforms.
I assume its will be a polyglot world for some time to come, and devs that decide to retool into another stack could use anything else, leaving Kotlin behind.
Hardly shortsighted. IntelliJ has a business model, Kotlin doesn't. Maximizing Kotlin usage does nothing for Jetbrains directly, just creates costs. And sure it brings people to IntelliJ, more importantly, it keeps them there.
It's kinda like describing Apple as short sighted for not giving away the source code to all their frameworks. Doing so would maximise usage but that's not their goal.
> Maximizing Kotlin usage does nothing for Jetbrains directly, just creates costs.
It brings mindshare and brand value. And it brings direct revenue in business contracts (I hope they get a hefty fee for supporting Google with Android Studio).
It is also investment in the future. How many student curriculums, courses, tutorials use IntelliJ over VSCode? And how many of them convert to IntelliJ later? IntelliJ is always seen as that heavy industrial combiner for professional workers compared to nimble and hype VSCode.
> And sure it brings people to IntelliJ, more importantly, it keeps them there.
I might be a vocal minority here, but it keeps nothing but resentment in me.
> It's kinda like describing Apple as short sighted for not giving away the source code to all their frameworks. Doing so would maximise usage but that's not their goal.
Apple is trillion dollar hardware company with completely locked down ecosystem with millions (billion?) of people using their products. They can do whatever the f*k they want and developers will dance to their tune.
The comparison you’re looking for is Borland. Delphi was once far more popular than Kotlin right now, and look how it ended up.
Google pay JetBrains nothing for Android Studio. Source: I talked to them at KotlinConf about it. Why would they? Do you see Google taking out huge contracts with Oracle for Java, or Red Hat for Linux? Google hardly even contributes to upstream projects, let alone funds them via fat support contracts. They prefer to develop everything in house, acquire outright or maintain their own forks if that isn't viable.
Google are members of the Kotlin Foundation. I guess as part of that they contribute towards the cost of the yearly conference. They've also generously open sourced some of the frameworks they built for Android. But go review the commit logs for IntelliJ or Kotlin and you'll see they're nearly all JB employees.
As for the rest, words have meaning. "Brand value" means people are willing to pay for things associated with that brand. "Investment" means something that can potentially yield ROI. Something given away for free with no supporting business model isn't an investment, it's charity.
The internet is littered with bitrotting projects that were treated as charity and then abandoned when the authors got tired of it. Apache fills up with more every year. The right comparison is thus not with Delphi (which made Borland a ton of money and is still on sale today via Embarcadero), but with NetBeans and Eclipse, both codebases abandoned by their former sponsors when the novelty value of having lots of users wore off.
> I might be a vocal minority here, but it keeps nothing but resentment in me.
OK, so don't use it then. Kotlin, at least in the JVM or JS variants, isn't the sort of language that requires a huge level of buy-in. I started using it before Kotlin 1.0 even came out, used it for the next decade after that, and was happy with it at every point. Back in those days the community was tiny but that doesn't matter due to its excellent JVM interop. At no point did I ever have any fear other than JetBrains not making enough money with it and defunding it. Fortunately, being a smart company, they haven't fallen into that trap.
Eclipse is relevant enough in big corporations that Microsoft has had to change their Java tooling offerings to support it just as well, regardless of the coolness factor in coffee shops coding.
One of the reasons might be that they realized that the absense of an official LSP for Kotlin will hinder its wide adoption by new developers who want to try Kotlin but don't want to move away from their favorite IDEs.
TIOBE is a famous benchmark, but it is also completely useless.
There is a lot of legacy code out there that skews the benchmark, making the index an unreliable indicator of a programming language’s current popularity or the volume of active development in that language.
You'd be hard-pressed to find a job where you can program Fortran or Assembly Language all day. It's a lot easier to find one where you can do Kotlin or Rust.
Kotlin might not be as popular as one would hope, but that is not something you should conclude from the TIOBE Index.
The TIOBE index is just reflecting search queries. If someone is familiar with a language, they would be searching about a specific framework, using LLMs/AI agents, and working on projects in that language. Those won't be reflected in the TIOBE index.
Nit: TIOBE measures search results, not searches, specifically results for "Kotlin programming". But you're correct that it's a terrible metric for many reasons.
I (and countless others I know) simply refuse to learn/use a language that locks you in an ecosystem. I haven’t taken Kotlin, C# or any of the Apple proprietary tech jobs and never will.
Kotlin may have been relatively IDE-locked without a proper LSP being available, but C# is cross-platform in terms of both editors and runtimes (assuming you're not targeting Windows' .NET stack).
At this point I wouldn't consider it any more or less proprietary than any other Microsoft language, like TypeScript for instance.
The debugger is proprietary but still works cross-platform. I don't know how Jetbrains does C# debugging in Rider exactly, but that shows that you don't have to use VS (Code) to do C# development if you don't want to.
The VSCodium C# community wants Microsoft to open source their debugger instead of having to maintain an open source version themselves, but that doesn't mean you need to use Microsoft's open source version. If anything, this forceful separation makes it so that there never will be only one implementation (like there is for languages like Rust which have always been open and therefore only have one way of doing things).
C# is partially cross-platform. Might be fine for web applications, but e.g. GUI frameworks aren't as cross in practice as they make it out to be, which I've wasted tens of hours figuring out before going back to Java and Racket.
The nice language on the CLR, F#, also doesn't seem to be very well liked by MICROS~1 anymore.
MAUI is cross platform for every platform most businesses care about (mobile+Windows+macOS). For the rest, there's Avalonia (and a bunch of alternatives, but Avalonia comes closest to Microsoft's systems I think).
You won't be writing visual bootloaders in plain C# any time soon, but the GUI side of C# is fine
Every language has its ecosystem. I don't know why being locked into the Java or C# ecosystem is any worse than, say Python or Go. And I say that as someone who has used all of these languages.
Moreover, every programming language has its own community.
With conventions, rules, style guides, code of conduct, roadmaps and mentality.
With some "weird" takes and with some "pragmatic insights", with their own "rock stars" and "graybeards" to respect and follow.
Each with its own unique landscape of hills to choose to die on.
"Nothing's wrong with XML", "Give me JSON or death", "Fuck that, YAML all the way for me", ".yaml is dead, long live .toml!", "pfff, you mortals have no idea but EDN is way better..." — and that's just some data-representation disagreements.
Once you get to actually processing the data, it gets even worse: "object-orientation is bullcrap", "oh, no, this FP shit is so hard to read for me, what's wrong with good-old 'for' loops?", "if you're not using static types, you're a bad, bad person...", "yes, these 35 libraries to run our 3-liner script are really necessary", etc.
Every single programming language has its own pain points and joyful bits.
That's why programming is both an amazingly gratifying and a heinously crappy trade.
Do you want to age into an old, happy programmer? Avoid emotional attachment to any single programming language. Borrow good ideas from different sources, but don’t settle on a single PL, paradigm, or convention. Sure, you’ll probably end up hating each of them for different reasons, but you may find some that you don’t loathe so badly.
Microsoft/Windows’s ecosystem. As an example, any general guide on the Internet or on Microsoft’s end is written assuming you are developing on and for Windows. I want to stay away from Windows as much as I possibly can but it just isn’t possible. That’s not the case with the other languages/ecosystems I mentioned.
After college I didn't do a lot of programming for some years. But then jumped into .Net with gusto, because I carried huge respect for Anders Hejlsberg. Back in college they taught us Pascal. It's not that I'm that old, it's just because I grew up in former Soviet Union, which has been lagging for decades behind American computer landscape, some curriculums ran with a huge delay. So, because I knew Pascal well, of course I was following Anders (creator of Turbo Pascal and Delphi). Anders worked for Borland. So, just so you know, Borland was huge back in the day, they made IDEs like Borland C++Builder and such. In fact, Borland was so big, my classmate one day has shocked me by telling me that he thought that the last name of Pascal (the mathematician) was "Borland", that's how (he thought) the company got its name.
Anyway, Anders left Borland and joined Microsoft and then .NET with VB and C# came out. In the beginning I was elated. After a few years building .NET apps, websites and services, I started digging for other things. Without even realizing, I slowly left the .NET behind me. Getting out, I recognized that the entire .NET stinked with an aura of some kind of "mental prison". I can't really describe the feeling now, but the entire community felt to me like needing some kind of approval all the time — from mothership company, from influencers like Scott Hanselman, from the Stack Overflow team, or some others like Pluralsight (which in the beginning was very .NET-centric).
I'm sure things perhaps have changed since then for the better — Satya has implemented some company-wide revolutionary changes, yet for me personally, the appeal of writing code targeting .NET has completely dissipated. I'm honestly not missing it a bit. Just a few months of coding something different taught me far more, improved my skills, and gave me invaluable perspective that I wouldn't find if I've stayed.
Like first result searching for .net brings you to this microsoft tutorial. Instruction for local development start with installing sdk that immediately offers linux install instructions and vscode also with direct links to .deb or .rpm packages
I think the overlap between "people who use Eclipse" and "people interested in Kotlin" is pretty small, though. I've only seen Eclipse in use with companies and teams stuck working on legacy applications.
> Now they are stuck with Kotlin being seen as an Android language for the most part
Perhaps it’s different elsewhere, but here in Norway I’ve seen Kotlin used quite extensively in large backend codebases. It also comes up frequently in job postings—employers seem to actively ask for it when hiring.
Most shops that use Kotlin on the backend also do Android development, as means to do core sharing between backend and Android, and there is the whole ART is not a JVM implementation anyway.
> Most shops that use Kotlin on the backend also do Android development, as means to do core sharing between backend and Android
None of the companies that I wrote Kotlin for or that I applied to used Kotlin for code sharing between backend and Android. It seems as if you're making a lot of assumptions in this comment thread.
Doesn't change the size of the market share anyway, an assumption done on links I shared, because this is the Internet and we have to prove every little word we write.
Can share more market research reports if you feel like, with similar numbers.
Given that Java is one of the most used languages globally, 10% of it is still significant. It's definitely easier to find a (backend dev) job using Kotlin around here than one using Elixir, Common Lisp or Haskell, yet I don't see you going around bashing those communities.
Why would anyone want to use VSC for Kotlin? After all the Kotlin creators are also the ones after JetBrains IntelliJ, it's hard to imagine some other IDE could suit Kotlin better?
It’s nice to have options. IntelliJ IDEs may be popular and well-regarded, but they’re not everybody’s cup of tea. As someone who’s spending a lot of time in Android Studio, it’s not unusual for me to become frustrated with it due to various behaviors and bits of UI design that can’t be changed, as well as fancy “smart” functionality that gets in the way almost as often as it helps.
I’m not terribly enthused with VS Code either but I’ll probably give this plugin a try, and since this has a standalone LSP it should be reasonable to write Kotlin plugins for other editors.
They even created Kotlin to help sell InteliJ licenses, cleary they are having an adoption problem outside Android.
"The next thing is also fairly straightforward: we expect Kotlin to drive the sales of IntelliJ IDEA. We’re working on a new language, but we do not plan to replace the entire ecosystem of libraries that have been built for the JVM. So you’re likely to keep using Spring and Hibernate, or other similar frameworks, in your projects built with Kotlin. And while the development tools for Kotlin itself are going to be free and open-source, the support for the enterprise development frameworks and tools will remain part of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, the commercial version of the IDE. And of course the framework support will be fully integrated with Kotlin."
In my case it is simple: I think IntelliJ is great but I much prefer VSCode and NetBeans.
Why? Two main reasons:
- On the projects I tend to work on, IntelliJ has a habit of breaking its internal configuration a few times a year—not just for me, but for my colleagues as well. When it does, it can take the better part of a day to sort out. Often I end up getting frustrated, deleting anything not under version control, reimporting the project, and end up having to reconfigure all the database connections and other bits manually.
- I also just prefer the more straightforward feel of NetBeans and VSCode. It’s a bit like my old car: less automation, fewer clever electronics. Sure, the new one is objectively better in many ways—but the old one was easier to get out of the snow, and it rarely surprised me.
I begrudgingly use IDEA because it was the only option if you wanted a decent IDE experience. The fwcd VS Code LSP for Kotlin that existed somewhat works, but it's very barebones and hasn't seen much development.
Before there was VS Code, I used Atom, so I've been on the VSC train for about as long as you can get.
Apart from legacy projects written in Kotlin, after Java 21/23, what's the argument for using Kotlin anymore, especially that it's a proprietary language?
In what sense is Kotlin a proprietary language? It's Apache 2.0 licensed AFAIK. And there are many projects that use Kotlin which are not legacy projects.
I love java and kotlin. The gap has certainly swayed way more in Java's favor over the last 5 years, but there are still a ton of great features that kotlin does first and if that gives java a target to run toward in a lagging way more legacy compatible rock solid way, isn't this just a win for both camps? Just consider kotlin (JVM) to be java-beta with slightly different flourishes, and you wouldn't be too far from the truth. Kotlin is also very big in pushing their other initiatives that aren't entirely directed at JVM at least for now, like cross compilation native targets, compile time serialization primitives, totally structured concurrency, etc
Aside from the often cited nullability issue, here is an (incomplete) list of important things that Kotlin still does better than Java:
- First class, fully functional closures.
- Non-abstract classes and methods are final by default.
- Named parameters.
- Easy to write iterators via sequence { ... }
- First class support for unsigned types.
Honestly, lack of the ability to write free-floating functions in Java.
Recent Java features like records, pattern matching, sum types via sealed interfaces have certainly made it a much more ergonomic and modern language.
But having to wrap everything in "class" feels ludicrous to me.
The other ones are lack of explicit null types (meant to be addressed by JEP "Null-Restricted and Nullable Types") and inability to write anonymous types for functions.
It's great jetbrains finally taking some babysteps to support an official language server for VSCode after some great resilience from them.
I know it's a difficult spot because such effort will also indirectly compete with their main product which is an IDE, so I'm not very optimistic it'll last.
>I know it's a difficult spot because such effort will also indirectly compete with their main product which is an IDE, so I'm not very optimistic it'll last.
I would say this if this step was taking early while Kotlin is still a new language in the market, but I think their late decision to develop an official LSP for Kotlin is because of reasons you just mentioned, but maybe they changed their minds because they saw other benifits including a wide adoption of Kotlin.
> Backend – a headless service that does the heavy lifting: indexing, static analysis, advanced search, navigation, and the like. Every such operation is initiated by a request from the workspace, which then processes the response and dispatches the data to the components that require it.
> As a backend, you can use a headless IntelliJ IDEA or a language server.
> Currently, the LSP implementation is partially closed-source
What. the. fuck.
So, it's Apache 2 for the TypeScript, seems to ship an Apache 2 copy of IntelliJ (just like any Java language server), but smuggles some kind of binary. They truly have lost their way
> Currently, the LSP implementation is partially closed-source, primarily for the sake of development speed convenience -- it heavily depends on parts of IntelliJ, Fleet, and our distributed Bazel build that allows us to iterate quickly and experiment much faster, cutting corners and re-using internal infrastructure where it helps. After the initial stabilization phase and defining the final set of capabilities, we will de-couple the LSP implementation from the internal repository and build pipelines and open source it completely
The full quote ...
Instead of working on this behind closed doors for the next year or so and then open sourcing everything, they are releasing some open source now with the intention to open source the rest later. I see no problem with that. Seems pragmatic. More companies should do that.
Bottom line, you are getting free stuff now. Some of it OSS now. All of it OSS later. No need to get upset.
As much as I love Kotlin and have a great deal of respect for JetBrains, I’ve always preferred the other Java IDEs over IntelliJ. The fact that choosing Kotlin—which I genuinely do prefer—effectively locks you into IntelliJ for the foreseeable future has been one of the main reasons I’ve hesitated to recommend it unreservedly for every project.
Just to be clear: I think IntelliJ and the rest of JetBrains’ tools are excellent and absolutely worth the price. I simply happen to prefer the alternatives—and they happen to be free. That said, I realise this is very much a personal preference, and one that most others don’t seem to share.
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