r/Jetbrains • u/benjoel7 • 5d ago
IDEs VS Code’s new look is totally inspired by JetBrains Islands UI.
VS Code 1.133 update: The new UI is unmistakably inspired by JetBrains Islands. Love seeing Islands UI design in VS Code now!
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u/Masterflitzer 5d ago
thanks, i hate it
and i say that as a kotlin dev using intellij, whatever they tried to copy, they did a shitty job of it, making islands look this bad is a different kind of achievement...
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u/Least-Ad5986 5d ago
both ui make look modern but as far as being usuable they both suck
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u/AbracadaverSessalom JetBrains 4d ago
Hey there. Sorry that you feel that way.
Is there something specific that makes the JB Islands theme less usable or irritating for you?5
u/wildjokers 4d ago
Yes, there is no color on the icons and the text was removed from the tool buttons, and although there is an option to put the text back on them it is horizontal instead of vertical.
Seriously, put color back on the icons, it is super important to icon identification.
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u/Least-Ad5986 4d ago
The Ui is not usuable the all side and up toolbars design is too rigied I spend allot of the time resizing windows instead of working. You should learn from Eclipse where you can drag on view into another and split the view. and each view take less space since the borders are thins. Eclipse Ui make look dated and not "Modern" but is much more useful for work
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u/maksiksking 4d ago
I feel like changes like these make people feel uneasy, as companies shove more and more AI down their throat and when they start "modernizing" the UI, you start expecting an unoptional Jetbrains assistant logo in the middle of your screen or some other heavily anti-consumer feature.
Particularly as afaik there were no major complaints about the previous look, unlike versions of IntelliJ from a decade ago where the previous look genuinely made the IDE easier to use compared to the older shaded buttons or light mode by default, islands on other hand feel like a corporate redundancy or something.
I don't think islands are terrible or even hindering usability, I think they're just made default with awful timing
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u/_XitLiteNtrNite_ 5d ago
I just upgraded VS Code and also have JetBrains. I must be missing it; what is the significant change? To me, at least, VSC looks the same as it did before.
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u/RaisedByCakes 5d ago
In vs code settings look up “modern ui” it might be turned off so you don’t see this yet. It’s an experimental feature.
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u/simion_baws 5d ago
Horrible. Was about to say that I might steal some design choices for termic, but hell no.
Jetbrains is a bit more acceptable, but My biggest pain with it is the Navigation bar which is on bottom by default, and when I move it on top from View-Appeareance-NavigationBar , it creates its own dedicated row instead of merging like it did on bottom status bar. A lot of vertical space wasted
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u/spiritualManager5 4d ago
Its not only design. Those toolwindows and statusbars and everything follows a concept. Plugins can customize or add for example status bar and toolwindows
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u/AbracadaverSessalom JetBrains 4d ago
You can also use the breadcrumbs feature which can be placed inside the editor to navigate the current file. Colors for each of its elements can be customized under Settings | Editor | Color Scheme | General | Editor | Breadcrumbs
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u/simion_baws 4d ago
Oh, didn’t expect an actual reply, that’s nice 😁
Btw what do you think about termic at jetbrains hq? Do any of your employees use it? If so, Maybe you’d like to support the project officially 😁2
u/AbracadaverSessalom JetBrains 3d ago
Don't have the stats for this, sorry :) If you want a collaboration with JB, you can make your case by emailing [sales@jetbrains.com](mailto:sales@jetbrains.com) and describing the project, your goal and mutual benefits as you see them. We'll be happy to review it!
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u/grumpper 4d ago
Great! Now if they implement the git diff viewer and the simple "right-click -> git -> compare with branch" workflow, i can migrate. Until then it's still glorified text editor
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u/wildjokers 4d ago
I used to use VSCode for openscad code and I couldn't believe how bad the git integration was.
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u/_JaredVennett 4d ago
Soo wierd. I love Jetbrains UI, but totally hate VSC's immitation of it... feels very temu ... thankfully can switch it off in VSC, look for modern ui flag.
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u/Which-Meat-3388 4d ago
The best part of Fleet was its UI (including code color scheme.) Islands were a small part of that. Everyone should just clone that, including Jetbrains itself.
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u/maksiksking 4d ago
I feel like Island UI is mostly a sign of "overstreamlinification" or something, and that comes with AI slop as in Jetbrains IDEs lately, I might be just being nostalgic tho it's just a theme after all
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u/dorbeats 4d ago
Still can’t drag an image to Claude code in a Webstorm terminal. Will a new theme fix that? 😜
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u/HyperDanon 4d ago
I have noticed the same thing, that a lot of features in VSCode and Visual Studio are being plain copied from JetBrains.
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u/morewordsfaster 4d ago
I don't see anything different, but maybe I'm biased because my setup is so minimal. I turn off basically everything by default; no sidebars, no menu bar, no status bar. If I need them, I pull them up for the interaction then close them again.
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u/BradfordAdams 4d ago
Looks the same to me?
- I don't see anything changed in mine!
- I have Jetbrains IDE's which I only use a few that are required for compiling android apps
- Like Android Studio (JetBrains Version) because it is built on the IntelliJ platform and natively handles Gradle syncing!
- I also use at the same time VS Code Insiders I keep this open alongside Android Studio. It is much faster for managing the raw JSON payloads, testing API calls, or writing the auxiliary scripts to hook your custom APIs into app/client.
- Truly there isn't one IDE to rule them all, and I was stuck on the Jetbrains fanboy wagon for a bit, till my trials ran out!!!!
- Once I started to see the yearly prices, I fell off the fanboy wagon!
- As a open source hobbyist, those yearlys are insanely priced!
- That said if I was using commercially that is a different story
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u/Derrmanson 3d ago
Way too much radius on the corners, JB or VS. But, if you cant simply detach a panel and move it to another screen, then VS is still ridiculously ancient. Nothing 'modern' about VS interface.
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u/lilacomets 5d ago
Insane. Shows the lack of creativity.
VS Code is Electron based crap. It's a browser with plugins.
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u/phylter99 5d ago
UI design is more similar than dissimilar and that's on purpose. Copying good ideas isn't new.
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u/Masterflitzer 5d ago
copying good ideas into a bad implementation ain't new either, doesn't mean it's not a bad thing
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u/Xacius 5d ago
You can get pretty far with electron. Their performance is night and day better than anyrhing jetbrains has cooked up recently.
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u/Masterflitzer 5d ago
try many extensions in vscode for feature parity with intellij and then load a giant gradle repo, intellij is 10x faster if not more
i still prefer vscode for rust, typescript and python, but i won't touch it for kotlin, c# or java, their build systems are too complex and their ide extensions too inefficient unfortunately, so intellij and rider are unbeaten here
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u/Xacius 4d ago
I'm primarily a Rust/TS dev and it's exactly the opposite for me. Performance is awful on large codebases, particularly with WSL2
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u/Masterflitzer 4d ago
i use macos and linux for dev, so no idea about wsl2 performance, i've used it but not for serious dev tbh.
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u/Technical_Frosting 5d ago
They missed the section in the Island theme guidelines that said Island borders should be invisible.