This is pretty huge all around, especially with Microsoft discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2022...

I'd also like to note the great integration Rider has with Godot and Unity for game development.

As a paying subscriber I love this move for the .NET community.

As a .NET dev for many years, I've noticed there have been periods of time where either Visual Studio or Rider was far better than the other. Currently, Rider is much better.

Hopefully this encourages more people to try out C# & F#. Both fantastic languages.

- Edit - Looks like Webstorm (JS/TS editor) is also free now.

WebStorm too

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/10/24/webstorm-and-ride...

Webstorm is now also free for non commercial use

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/10/24/webstorm-and-ride...

Genuine question with an open mind: why would I use this and not vscode?

I know people complain about lag in vscode but I have personally never experienced/noticed any. So with that in mind what does rider give that vscode cannot?

JetBrains licenses are one of the few software licenses that I pay for. Their IDEs have the features I need while keeping the UI from getting in the way.

Regarding free non-commercial use in Jetbrains you need to accept that you'll get checked (not specified how, but I guess they will scrape your HDD? Or what?

  It’s also important to note that if you’re using a non-commercial license, you cannot opt out of the collection of anonymous usage statistics. This is similar to our Early Access Program (where statistics is opt-out) and in compliance with our Privacy Policy

Beautiful. Rider is an awesome a much faster IDE and I use it whenever possible. It is not practical for all projects.

The only behaviour that annoys me a bit:

- Double clicking an identifier should select the full identifier. However, in Rider (as opposed to Visual Studio) it is connected to the CamelHump setting - which is useful by itself. In Visual Studio you can have both CamelHump enabled and “double clicking the identifier selects the whole identifier”.

- Any startup project tasks like maybe a “webpack watch task” is “in the way” when stopping run/debug of your current application. A separate task runner like in Visual Studio would be beneficial.

- If a solution has file templates defined, every user needs to activate/select them manually in the settings. Quite cumbersome.

The pricing page says the Free version collects anonymous data. I understand the paid versions don’t. Does it say anywhere the kind of anonymous data that is collected in the Free version?

This is also true of WebStorm now, too. Discussion on the announcement:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41935128

There are a few privately owned companies that amaze me: JetBrains, Valve among the top. Somehow they have a much better value/user and make reasonable decisions: counter intuitive to investors/shareholders but insanely intuitive to their users.

I am sure the public market has made the general public reap the rewards of large companies (kudos!) but some of the privately owned companies are absolutely kicking ass to serve their customers instead.

Rider is a really great product - probably the next generation of coders will be split between VS Code and Rider with this change.

As a looooooooong term intellij user, it surprised me that Rider is the more performant IDE (IDEA was the primary product - i expected it to have the best experience). I've used Rider a fair bit over the past 18 months or so (all products licence) and it's still very noticeable every time i spend time in Rider.

There is a lot of praise here for JetBrains. I love their products, but sadly they joined the devcontainer race way too late and the condition of their products does not allow for serious development with dev containers. Their Gateway application is still in beta, and it doesn't always work, but it's faring much better than their early access devcontainer IDEs which are in a sorry state.

I can't believe that this late in the game my team has no choice but to actually give up on jetbrains for some time. We tried our best to make it work with their products because we enjoy them dearly. But if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. VSCode has a mature, and most important functioning, devcontainer ecosystem.

Not sure if Rider even has devcontaier support but good for jetbrains for releasing a community edition.

I'd been subscribed for the best part of a decade to their all products pack, liked the products, but they kept doing stuff that really rubbed me the wrong way in a paid product, e.g: shoving the AI offering down my throat and initially having no way to remove it, and then when I paid most recently, they sent me some spammy marketing for some third party product as a "thank you", and I cancelled my subscription there and then.

I don't mind paying for a good product, but I want the experience to be less irksome than the free offerings out there, I get enough annoying advertising from free stuff I use, if I'm paying good money, I don't want that.

[dupe] More on official post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41935128

I like Rider very much, but personally moved to VSCode because of many little annoying bugs that aren't being fixed. E.g. typescript refactoring problems, .NET native code debugging from C#, TFS support etc. And maybe it's changing but I felt that the progress for new features and IDE maintenance stalled (for obvious reasons).

I have a very good perception of Jetbrains as a brand, even though I have only used YouTrack for some days. What I don't understand is, why do they have so many IDEs instead of a single one? Is it really necesary? Are language writting/editing needs so different? Honest question here.

This is great! I found myself preferring the rider student license I had at home to Visual Studio we had at work when I was actively writing a lot of c# and some f# recently. It didn't feel fast outright, but at least faster than VS, and the memory profiler was much more immediately grokkable to me.

What makes it tailored for .Net and games? Does that mean it's less appropriate for other types of development?

For example, I'm using VS Code to work on a back-end based on Deno, which has a plug-in for VS Code. Would I find Rider a less-hospitable development environment?

I really like their loyalty bonuses. The price for the whole thing drops down really low over time.

Have been using VS Studio for 10+ years and never used Rider.

What are the most compelling reasons to switch? I have heard lots of praise but little substance so far.

For .NET dev it seems hard for any IDE to rival VS Studio's tight integration with the whole MS + .NET ecosystem.

Activation required. Still a nice deal.

Also looks like an online account is required.

what does free for non-commercial use really mean ?

if you make a game, then it gets popular what happens ? or some .net api?

I'm always confused by such licensing terms e.g what ended up happening with Unity.

Microsoft should’ve done a Google and Licensed the JetBrains IDE for .Net. Visual Studio feels like Windows in all the worst ways.

Rider saved me some sanity when I had to work with .Net.

Rider is by far the best C# IDE. Especially if you're not running Windows. It was a real lifesaver while working with Unity.

Many developers have gratis JetBrains license on account of being involved in FOSS. I'm in that category - have to apply each year for a license by referring to (one of) my FOSS library(ies).

It's just too bad that their UI is going in the direction of VSCode and others, become more... I guess I could say smartphone-like.

Is Rider nerfed as much as the free version of IDEA is? And if not, then why isn't there a free noncommercial version of IDEA? This seems like a smack to the face for Java developers that want to use the full version of IDEA for noncommercial purposes.

In a way, it was about time:

How else am I supposed to get convinced into buying it given the (probably more mature) default choice of VS Studio 22?

Reading about the rationale for this move this seems to be precisely their reason too.

Anyway, might try it out after all now given all the fuss ...

Limited commercial use 1 to 3 devs should also be freek as projects this small usually are just starting and aren't profitable yet. Beyond that, yes , it should be sustainable for the team to pay for commercial license.

If they want to grab market share they should include dotMemory to the free offer. Basically dotUltimate without ReSharper. Otherwise free Rider users will need to install free Visual Studio for enhanced profiling.

Well, these code assistant AI models won’t train themselves…

For someone who just got into game development on Mac, this is very interesting. I'd never heard of this IDE before. Will give it a try.

Btw, as a paying ultimate user for the Java EE features I was surprised how good vscode support for the same is. And completely for free

I wish Jetbrains could save me from Xcode. Please.

Rider is much better and faster than Visual Studio, and it's worth every penny. Making it free is a great move.

Rider is such an excellent IDE. This is great news for anyone involved in the .net world.

I'm learning F# and have been using VSCode. How different/better JetBrains Rider support for F# is?

VIM is free too. As is Xcode.

Any news about whether this will apply to RustRover too soon?

Anyone know how well this works with Godot?

Will this happen for CLion too

Now do CLion. I cannot stand using VS on windows.

Can I just say I absolutely hate how the grid layout is ever so gently not straight until you scroll passed it, and then when you scroll back up it's all like "no I was always straight, what are you talking about". Stop making me worry about whether I'm having a stroke.

Awesome news.

What an amazing accomplishment JetBrains has done.

It's a bootstrapped, European company, doing $400M+ annually in revenue selling to developers (who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay).

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/annualreport-2023/

However, be careful with the terms of non-commercial usage (Enforced heavy metrics)

"You agree that the product will send usage data to validate your compliance with the license terms and anonymous feature usage statistics..."

"The information collected under Sections 4.1. and 4.2. may include but is not limited to frameworks, file templates used in the Product, actions invoked, and other interactions with the Product’s features."

I have loved JetBrains ever since I entered their ecosystem for the End of the World Sale in 2012. As a professional developer, I need my tools to work for me and not against me. That is why I pay for these tools and I appreciate JetBrains' consistent iteration on making them even better.

I do have a few gripes though. I wish the performance was better on my current setup on my M2 MBP. It is an awful experience when tools get in your way and break your flow. The file sync to MacOS is fairly laggy and new files that are created can take seconds to appear. UI interactions can be laggy. Sometimes invoking the context sensitive intentions/actions is blocking where it will hang for seconds. I need to keep my movements fluid to keep my train of thoughts on the track and not be derailed by my ADD.

I also would like a plug-in system that wasn't entirely on Kotlin, Groovy and Java. I did Groovy dev in a past life but it's painful for me today. Thankfully ChatGPT gets me most of the way there. I wish there were JS/TS bindings to build upon.

Overall, I'm pleased with JetBrains. I appreciate their content they put out on YouTube to further empower the developers that use their products with knowledge and guidance of efficiencies. I'll continue using it as my core IDE for the foreseeable future. I have augmented my flow with a bit of Cursor but JetBrains is the bread and butter.

I loved JetBrains IDEs years back.

These days I am mostly using NeoVim.

I decided today to stop supporting JetBrains BECAUSE there is no good kotlin language server.

I would gladly pay them money even if I don't use their IDEs if only they provided a good language server.

The design of the yellow/black cells holding language/tech tripped me out for a sec, on my laptop they're all crooked at the top but align themselves after a certain amount of scroll. Thought I was seeing an optical illusion but a refresh shows that it's not. I don't think this was intentional.

Sounds like they got a big present from Microsoft.

Rider has a lot going for it, but I really can't stand the structure of JetBrains subscription. Why can't they just have a single monthly or annual price, rather than this absurd structure where the price gets cheaper over time, encouraging lock-in?

Note that you will still have to pay for the AI support, which is presumably a major factor in this strategy.

ie. How many devs will really use it in it's "free" state as titled? Fewer and fewer I suspect.

I'm sceptical about the prevalence of non-AI-centred-IDEs going forward - we live in a new era now - and I guess JetBrains have also come to that conclusion and this is a pivot to support the thesis.