Thoughts on using JetBrains fleet

I’ve been playing with Jetbrains’ Fleet editor in the past couple of weeks, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised!

I’ve had to write some JS for WebAuthN / passkey support in Spring Security, and so I needed an editor for that. My daily driver is IntelliJ for Java (and Go when I have to), and, while I know I can do my JS in there (or in Webstorm), I thought it was time to try something else. My daily driver for text-based editing is Neovim¹, and I tend to fall back to Visual Studio Code when I have to do multi-file editing or code-related stuff that’s not Java, such as Python.

I had tried Fleet a bit when it came out two-three years ago, but it didn’t click for me. It may be a bit silly, but I missed the smooth caret movement from VS Code 😅️ I had a general feeling that VS Code was, I don’t know, snappier? But it’s been quite a while, so time to try it out again!

The good

Remember, I live, I breathe IntelliJ. I opened the editor, selected the “IntelliJ” key bindings… And boom, it was just like home. It feels very Jetbrains-y in its layout, the way it thinks about different panes and how to access them - no need for a new mental model, that’s a plus.

Most importantly, it Just Works™. It picks up the JavaScript file, shows you syntax errors, helps with autocomplete (as much as possible - it’s JavaScript after all) and generally does what you would expect it to do.

There’s this “smart mode” that allows you to do programming-related tasks, beyond text editing, and it’s really, really smart. For example, I’m writing my tests using Mocha, complete with their lingo describe(...), it(...), etc. I press Ctrl Shift R, and it runs my tests. No configuration required, no settings to enable stuff, no plugin, it just works.

The formatting uses prettier and gives you predictable, standard JS formatting.

The general editor is discoverable: open the command palette, type familiar words you know from IntelliJ, and you’ll find the commands you’re looking for. The settings has a simple search bar that allows you to find stuff, and since there are not too many options, you don’t spend hours pondering how to make it do what you want.

I’d say the general “Out of the Box” experience is much nicer than VS Code, I don’t have to deal with plugins, wonder why there 200 of them that seem relevant, configure a linter when I try to format, etc. Great first contact!

The not-so-good

Nothing is either “bad” or “ugly” in Fleet, no deal-breakers. Mind you, it’s not perfect and has its share of “not-so-good” items.

While it’s discoverable, it’s only to a point. Some features are missing, e.g. “go to next splitter” when you use multiple editing “splits”, and it’s not 100% clear at first whether it’s not there or you are doing it wrong. I guess not everyone comes from IntelliJ, so the experience is not “IntelliJ but different” and you do have to put in a little bit of work to understand all the things you can do.

Running a test was easy, but making a “configuration” to run all my tests was kind of shooting in the dark - the docs tell you about JavaScript run configurations, but only list npm, node, jest and nodeAttach. Lo and behold, there’s an undocumented, un-discoverable mocha config type that … I made up? Found on Stack Overflow? Can’t remember. For the record, it looks like so:

{
    "configurations": [
        {
            "type": "mocha",
            "name": "Run all tests",
            "file": "test/",
        },
    ]
}

In general, the documentation is quite lackluster. For example, Prettier is used for code formatting. You can configure prettier in many ways (e.g. with .prettierrc, a prettier key in package.json, …), but only some configurations are supported by Fleet, and that’s for you to discover.

Some stuff feels less polished too - the directory I work in happens to have a build.gradle file to orchestrate the npm build as part of the bigger project. But that is not what I use during my JS development. Smart mode has decided that it’s a Gradle project and wants to import it, but it lacks the rest of the project config, the wrapper, etc. And Fleet won’t let me exclude this unrelated java artifact from my project (or at least I haven’t found how). So now I’m stuck with this “can’t import Gradle project” error that pops up once in a while and that I can’t fix.

It also had this weird behavior, every time I used the “Go To” command Cmd O to open a file, it opens a new tab with this file. So when I navigated with this, I ended up with the same tab open ten times… But that seemed fixed this week, so at least things are moving fast!

Verdict?

I like it. I think for basic stuff, I like it more than VS Code and its plugin hell. For complex project, I’ll probably switch to a full-fledged editor, Webstorm or Pycharm, but for my small, simple project, it’s been quite nice.

Now, the elephant in the room - could it displace VS Code? I don’t think so, Visual Studio is already too entrenched, you can customize it any way you like, it’s used everywhere, even in your browser… So it’s probably a tough hill to climb for the new-ish kid on the block. But Fleet could be the base for Jetbrains’ next generation of IDEs, so I’m not too worried about its future.

My thoughts? It’s been fun to use, so give it a spin!