What is the long-term plan with Fleet? Will it eve...

# fleet

[koufa]

What is the long-term plan with Fleet? Will it eventually replace Intellij Idea? Or will Intellij stay as an alternative for hardcore Java devs and all other Idea siblings (Webstorm etc) will be served from Fleet?

[zsmb]

This is something that was addressed in this blog post, for example: https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2023/11/kotlin-multiplatform-tooling-in-fleet/#our-commitment-to-intellij-idea-and-the-intellij-platform

[koufa]

Ok that means Intellij Idea will stay as long as there is demand for Backend JVM Devs and the rest of the Intellij gang will be served by Fleet. Thanks for the link.

[darkmoon_uk]

As a long-time IntelliJ family user and Kotlin fanatic, my problem with this plan is that Fleet's UX design assumes everyone wants low-to-no GUI controls and to rely on keyboard shortcuts for everything. Yes there are a lot of folk who live by keyboard shortcuts, but there are also many who don't, and I think forcing a keyboard-first approach on all devs is a mis-step from JB product leads that will make the software a lot more painful to use for a lot of people - it's actually quite mean in a way 😞

Unifying the IntelliJ family of technologies under one technical umbrella is a great initiative in itself; but Fleet has such a big hill to climb to match IntelliJ's maturity, I wonder why it wasn't tackled as more of an 'IntelliJ Unification Reboot' than some separate VSCode clone with unwarranted (and unwanted) simplification of the design.

I have to ask (rhetorically) - where's the evidence that 'Fleet' - specifically its UX - is what users want?

[Todd]

Unifying the IntelliJ family of technologies under one technical umbrella is a great initiative in itself; but Fleet has such a big hill to climb to match IntelliJ's maturity

This is the part I struggle with. I'm okay with change, but it's hard to justify switching over when the many features I'm relying on in Intellij haven't been implemented yet for fleet. I want to see the team succeed, but I'm sure it's a huge undertaking to get to feature parity.

I'm also not sold on the UI/UX. I like it as a replacement to sublime text for editing files, but not as a full fledged IDE. Perhaps that's just because I'm so used to Intellij at this point though.

I'm not trying to be too negative, I just wanted to voice my thoughts. I hope I can be proven wrong 🙂

[koufa]

@zsmb Coming back to this question. What's the plan with Fleet regarding languages like Rust. As RustRover was recently release is there a plan to support alternative languages to Java only in Fleet ? I have rechecked the link you shared and by the wording "Having said that, the target audience for IntelliJ IDEA will primarily remain that of server-side developers targeting the JVM." this seems to be implied there

[vitaly.bragilevsky]

Hi @koufa! Although we've launched RustRover as a standalone Rust IDE, Rust is and will be supported in IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate via a plugin that provides basically the same functionality as RustRover itself. Rust support in Fleet doesn't use RustRover's engine, it leverages the LSP connection to rust-analyzer instead. As far as I'm aware, we don't have plans to change the current situation. The blogpost you've mentioned doesn't seem to cover non-JVM languages, so there're no implications regarding Rust and other non-JVM languages support in IDEA or Fleet.