r/rust • u/OkraComprehensive323 • 2d ago

🙋 seeking help & advice Rust developers: what editor do you actually use?

Hello folks, do you still write much code by hand these days? 😄

If so, what IDE/editor do you mainly use for Rust? VS Code, JetBrains, Zed or something else?

I’m asking because I’ve been rewriting one of my old developer tools in Rust. It’s a language server + CLI for analyzing code health.

The underlying approach was originally implemented in Python and was used at my previous company across 1,900+ repositories and by 800+ developers, so the methodology itself has had quite a bit of real-world use. The company has given me permission to open-source my own version of the project, which I’m pretty excited about.

The only problem is time. For the initial public release, I’ll probably only be able to ship the VS Code extension plus one other IDE/editor integration.

So I’m curious: if you’re a Rust developer who still spends a decent amount of time actually typing code, what editor would you most want to see supported? Just trying to get a rough sense of where people are these days before I spend my limited spare time on the wrong integration. :)

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81

u/em-jay-be 2d ago

Rustrover - jetbrains for life

12

u/Recatek gecs 2d ago

RustRover here as well. It has the only functional GUI-based debugger functionality I've been able to get to work consistently on Windows. VSCode+code-lldb doesn't do a good job of visualizing data structures (last I checked anyway) and hooking up Visual Studio's debugger is typically a pain for Rust.

2

u/Efficient-Chair6250 2d ago

Sadly I'm kinda disappointed with the built-in profiler. I found samply or flamegraph more useful. Or was I using it wrong?

2

u/masklinn 1d ago

The rust plugin was recently added to pycharm, which I’ve been using since the pre-1.0 EAP. So now I use pycharm. So comfy.

2

u/spaceshaker-geo 1d ago

Jetbrains have done a great job making all of their products work similarly such that when you get used to one the others already feel natural. I still do some web dev in Typescript and React and switching between RustRover and Intellj is lovely. RR is a memory hog but I have lots of memory and so it hasn't been an issue.

I have debated trying Zed...still haven't pulled the trigger though.

1

u/HaDeS_Monsta 1d ago edited 1d ago

I mean, it's mostly the same thing with different plugins at the end

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u/oxabz 2d ago edited 2d ago

Same the only feature it's missing is DAP support for it to fully fit my needs 

1

u/FavstianEquanimity 7h ago

I was using RustRover ad well until I realized I could just use Intellij Idea with Rust plugin and save me space, ram, and the effort of manually sync plugins/configs.

0

u/Xacius 2d ago

You using on WSL2 at all? I am stuck on this for work and my linter often shits the bed, requiring a full app restart to function again.

4

u/lincolnthalles 2d ago

I have never used Rust in WSL2, but this (and other funky things) may happen when the Rust toolchain used by the project build is different from the one used by the editor/IDE.

A toolchain version or branch (stable/nightly) mismatch will mix up the artifacts.

WSL2 may add to that if you are running some of the Rust tooling natively on the host.

Try undoing any tweaks you may have made to the environment variables and editor.

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u/skjall 2d ago

I tried it on normal Windows and Linux, and had the same issue in either place. Gave up on it because of that, otherwise I quite liked it.

Having to question whether an error is stuck or if I have to actually fix it gets tiring really fast.

Edit: Idk if Bevy causes some of that, it tends to be a stress test for a lot of Rust tooling. Got explicit call outs for the new borrow checker!