What's the end goal?
Hi,
first of all, huge fan of JB products!
I just wonder what crowd is the target audience for Fleet?
I am mostly using Rider, a bit of PyCharm, love both. I really enjoy that those can become my “whatever I do, I use the same tool”. Database support is awesome, Rider works great for web-dev also.
Recently I played around with Rust during Advent of Code, my first though was hey, let's fire up Rust Rover! Unfortunately, it was so slow to open a directory with a separate project for each day. Gigabytes of ram just to watch some spinners.
In the end I fired up Neovim and that was a blast - I really enjoyed keyboard only nature of it, the abillity to use vim motions in the terminal for navigation and selection. It was fast, snappy, I could start a watcher to rerun tests on save, debug (that part sucks :)) - it was pretty cool. However, configuration is a pain.
I fired up Fleet and immediately it felt more like Neovim than Rider - generic editor, with custom sources for stuff. It also auto-installed everything I neede - whether it's dotnet backend, TypeScript plugins etc - really cool.
I am fully aware that it's still in progress, so I don't judge things like RAM usage or scroll smoothnes (both aren't that great now on Windows).
I am also aware that Rider and InteliJ in general have quite a lot of legacy code in them, so some things just are not possbile (like proper Neovim-like consistent keyboard only navigation).
Is Fleet planned to be more like Neovim (editor + LSP/Smart Mode per language), or is it an attempt to rewrite the Idea Platform from scratch, to eliminate specialized IDEs and have a single product that does it all?
Unless Fleet becomes “the one thing to rule them all”, so that I don't have to switch between Rider and PyCharm cosntantly, and it will get full keyboard only setup, I don't see anybody choosing it over a specialized IDE.
So, what's the end goal? I saw you closed the position for fleet developer, so I guess it will continue to get better
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Hi, thanks for sharing your feedback and thoughts! The short answer is that we see Fleet as a modern coding tool. That means a bunch of things, including minimalistic UI, support for a bunch of languages, and remote development. The use cases can vary – for some it can be a companion tool like neovim is for you, for others it can become a primary tool. With the AI very quickly shifting how we develop code, we are trying to keep Fleet as versatile as possible.
Qrzychu You'll notice you didn't really get an answer to that. This has been the pattern on here with the more substantial questions about the intention and direction of the product: Jetbrains' responses are of the slippery customer service style non-answer variety. It's frustrating.
There is / was interest in Fleet, but this is likely to wane – developers tend not to have much tolerance for this sort of low-grade marketing waffle. Lacking any solid statements or commitments from JB, people will just move on.
> Is Fleet planned to be more like Neovim (editor + LSP/Smart Mode per language)
In this sense, the answer is yes. It's an editor with optional smart mode available per language powered by LSP or other code engines, e.g. IntelliJ.
This is the vision for Fleet we currently have. I understand that you would like to hear more detailed and long-term plans and commitments for Fleet and we will try to do our best to deliver them but Fleet is still a new, not yet commercially released product and we are exploring different opportunities, in search of the best market for it.
How about the vim bidnings? I know it's not implemented pretty much at all yet, but InteliJ platform really misses basic things, like navigating between panes (and within them) with vim motions, selecting autocomplete option, vim motions in terminal etc
It even doesn't allow using commands like <leader> something without an editor window open, because it's an editor plugin. Are there plans to make this part better?
Also, can you share a timeline on when Fleet will become actually usable? Seems like it's in the works for couple years now, and competition like Zed or Helix poped into existence as way more feature complete (Zed also has live collaboration and remote development). They are a bit different, yes, but Fleet development seems exteremly slow by comparison.
Also, now that Fleet is dropping Kotlin Multiplatform support, is there even a future for Fleet?
There's basic Vim support available in Fleet, and there are plans to develop it further; however, realistically we do not think we can reach the high level of expectations many Vim users have in the nearest future.
> Also, can you share a timeline on when Fleet will become actually usable?
Are there any specific areas you have in mind? Like Zed, Fleet does provide collaborative and remote development.
> Also, now that Fleet is dropping Kotlin Multiplatform support, is there even a future for Fleet?
KMP wasn't the reason why we started working on Fleet. From the very start we envisioned Fleet as a versatile lightweight code editor capable of working in remote environments. That positioning hasn’t changed.