JetBrains: IntelliJ IDEA and related IDE new version UI preview released

IT House May 31 news, IntelliJ IDEA celebrated its 20th birthday last year. Over the past 20 years, the team has been improving every aspect of the product, including its user interface and usability. However, the team made relatively minor changes in many aspects of the UI in between, mainly because the team wanted to keep the familiar UI available to the millions of existing users of the team IDE. At the same time, UI trends in the industry continued to evolve, with many new users to the team telling the UI that it looked a bit clunky and outdated. Solving this problem will inevitably involve major changes. Therefore, the team made a bold decision,Takes a fresh look at UI and completely reimagines how IntelliJ IDEA and related IDEs look in this day and age.

The team’s goal was to reduce visual complexity, make it easy for users to access essential functions, and step through complex functions as needed – resulting in a clean, modern, and professional look and feel.

Major changes in the new UI include:

• Simplified main toolbar with new VCS, Project and Run widgets.

• New tool window layout.

• New light and dark themes.

• Updated icon set.

The team also released a more detailed list of changes and known issues:

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/articles/IDEA-A-156/Main-changes-and-known-issues

Fleet is a new product that represents the team’s attempt to rebuild the entire IDE from scratch, while the new UI is the team’s redesign of the existing JetBrains IDE product line. The team has changed the appearance of the main IDE window and some aspects of the user experience, while all code-centric features and integrations continue to work as they did before. The new UI is expected to be fully compatible with all IntelliJ plugins (theme plugins may need to be updated).

Building a new UI is a major undertaking that affects the day-to-day work of all users on a team. Because of this, the team is taking a step-by-step and feedback-driven approach to advancing this work. Now, the team is launching a preview program that will give limited users early access to a preview version of the new UI, with the option to share feedback directly with the design and development teams. Later this year, the team will make the new UI available to all users to try out, and the team plans to make it the default UI next year — first for new users and then for all other users. The new UI will eventually be available in all IntelliJ-based products, but some products may be delayed.

While the team iterates on the refinement and refinement of the new UI (based on the insightful feedback the team expects from users), the team also plans to continue with the old and new UI for at least a year after the new UI becomes the default UI. The team is also prepared to revise the rollout schedule based on the feedback received in case the team needs to do more design work in certain areas.