JetBrains Fleet, a competitor to Microsoft VS Code?

Fleet is the new next-generation IDE created by JetBrains, and if you don’t know who JetBrains is, they are a software development company that has designing and creating cutting-edge software development tools like PyCharm, PhpStorm, DataGrip and IntelliJ IDEA for 20 years.

Fleet is being marketed as a lightweight editor which is modular and compatible with anything, which can be used just as a simple editor or a fully-fledged IDE. This is done by separating the Fleet into two components, the editor and the IntelliJ code-processing engine, where the IntelliJ can be turned on and off as per the user's needs.

These two components let Fleet be an editor which is IDE-smart. An editor which has project and context aware code completion, navigation to definitions and usages, code quality checks and quick fixes.

Fleet is also flexible. You can just run Fleet on your local machine editing local files, or… You can connect to a remote machine and use an instance of Fleet running there to work with your code. Or connect to projects hosted in Space, an all-in-one solution for software teams by JetBrains, with a ready-to-use dev environment. Support for Docker is coming soon, allowing a user to run Fleet in one or several docker containers with a desired environment for your project.

Sometimes you need to pair-program or have a fellow developer get their hands dirty with your dev environment. Fleet gives you these abilities, to share the editor, terminal, debugging sessions and perform code reviews all out of the box.

Fleet automatically detects your project configuration from the source code and configures the code-processing engine, giving you the full benefits of an IDE. The languages supported directly by JetBrains are Java, Kotlin, Python, Go, JavaScript, Rust, TypeScript and JSON, with support coming soon for PHP, c++, c# and HTML. The user experience across these languages will remain consistent, allowing the user to have a single IDE for multiple languages.

JetBrains Fleet is something new and exciting, and a possible challenger to Microsoft VS Code. I suggest you get early access to test it or subscribe to updates so you know when it’s released.