Developer tools company JetBrains has opened up public preview access to its Fleet integrated development environment (IDE) and editor.
According to Hadi Hariri, writing for JetBrains, Fleet attracted more than 137,000 sign-ups to its initial private preview of the polyglot editor and IDE software.
“We have had an overwhelming amount of interest,” Hariri said. “In the coming months we’ll be working on stabilising Fleet and addressing as much of the feedback we get as possible.”
Fleet is based on JetBrains’ IntelliJ platform on the backend, teamed with a new user interface and distributed architecture. To download Fleet, you need to use the JetBrains Toolbox App.
Hariri cautioned that it won’t replace IntelliJ IDEA, although certain features from its other tools will be carried over. It won’t have the same functionality as JetBrains other IDEs more generally — with a key advantage being the distributed architecture for those who need that.
“The list of technologies we’re planning to support is quite long,” he noted. “Some things may not work as expected, even if they’re listed as supported. If you do encounter issues, we’d very much appreciate it if you could log them … via the Send Feedback option in Fleet’s Help menu.”
Fleet is an opportunity for JetBrains to provide a different user experience for developers. However, having said that, the company still wants to hear about anything users feel is missing — from refactoring options to tool integrations and beyond.
“Our existing IDEs will continue to be developed, and we have a lot of plans for them, including performance improvements, a new user interface, remote development, and more,” Hariri explained.
“Fleet also uses the intelligence from our existing tools under the hood, so none of these tools are going anywhere.”
For Fleet, JetBrains is continuing to develop API support, a plugin author software development kit (SDK), memory footprint and other areas that affect performance, themes and keymaps in coming months.
“Given that Fleet has a distributed architecture, we need to work on simplifying the approach for plugin authors. While we guarantee that we’ll be providing a platform for extending Fleet, we do ask for a bit more patience in this area,” Hariri said.
One goal might be to improve code completion for developers working with multiple programming languages, perhaps struggling with the likes of Go and JavaScript while preferring Kotlin, Rust and text file notes.
The company has uploaded a series of Fleet-explanatory blogs and videos to help developers get started, as well as the usual documentation online.
( Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash )
