"Can you selfhost the server-side?" is the biggest question If not, you're buying into dev platform-as-a-service.

Funny, it's the opposite for me: Would someone please host the serverside so I don't have to? I'd love to pay for an IDE-as-a-service that updates itself, syncs itself everywhere, has all the right extensions, auto-configures Docker and data stores and secrets and Git and linting and Webpack interation and and and... etc. Something like Vercel but for the IDE.

I hate fighting IDEs (whether it's IntelliJ or VSCode) before I can write useful code. Javascript has gotten so bloated that half the challenge of any new project is setting up tooling. God, I'd love a 1-click "create new project" and then a GDocs-like IDE in the cloud, and would happily pay to never have to configure that again myself.

Doesn’t IntelliJ sync most of that? I use IntelliJ on 3 computers and all my extensions and even themes are synced.

And are you aware of platforms like Cloud9 that have been available for 10 years that give you an online developer environment?

Honestly the only two reasons I personally don’t use them is because (1) I’ve never been at any company or place in the world where the Internet was truly 100% available with dependably low latency and near zero jitter and (2) nothing beats IntelliJ for me.

I've used IntelliJ for a decade (including several hours today) and it's never very seamless. The sync features are hit or miss, especially across platforms -- I've used it on various Windowses, Linuxes, and macOS. The hotkeys aren't the same, the interpreters aren't the same, the containers (Docker or Python) don't function the same, the linters don't present the same, the NPM modules don't always compile on different architectures (sigh, M1), the memory settings don't always persist, some are synced to Jetbrains and others are stored per-repo... it's a nightmare to untangle. The syncing is there, sort of, but it's far from seamless. There is still a lot of complexity and points of failure between the bare metal and my code (whether it's PHP or Python or Javascript). And if you can't afford IntelliJ ultimate and use separate products (like PyCharm and PHPStorm), the integrations are even worse, along with trying to figure out which product offers which feature (like Javascript support, or SQL).

What I'm hoping for is an easily reproducible dev environments with common-sense images that can be maintained and edited in the cloud, almost like Docker images, with all that stuff preconfigured... the latest interpreters, node, yarn, xdebug, webpack, blah blah all just preconfigured and ready to go. Next.js does some of that, the dev tool Lando tries to do that (but is pretty buggy), but all of it still requires a lot of manual configuration. And coding across platforms (like Windows desktop + Mac laptop) is still a huge PITA even though it all gets deployed to bog-standard LEMP stacks in the end.

It's just such a far cry from, say, being able to seamlessly use the Adobe Suite or Slack or Zoom or Microsoft Office across platforms and projects. I guess it's a bit unfair to compare first-party vendor software to messy open-source ecosystems, but that's what I'm ultimately griping about... I don't want to spend time doing devops instead of coding visitor-facing features. Some companies have dedicated people for that; our org can't afford that, so I just have to figure it out as I go, doing a piss-poor job most of the time. Wish there was a vendor + service to take care of that, and present just a usable IDE in the end, with all the internals abstracted away and maintained in the cloud. Ideally it would be a thin local client with native GUI but offloaded processing, vs a laggy screenshare.

I haven't tried Cloud9 in particular but have tried other cloud IDEs, which just felt like remote desktops running on someone else's machine that I still have to do all the same tooling and maintenance for myself. If Cloud9 or others DOES do what I want and I just missed it, please let me know.

shrug Maybe I'm just getting too old for this stuff. I miss the simple jQuery days when there was the DOM and that was it, not a bazillion layers of tooling and the super complex packagers and containers and other enterprise tech required to support them.

I also use JetBrains’s products extensively. I used to have on intellij settings repository for all products (PHPStorm, PyCharm, Webstorm), but I found the same issue that the settings wouldn’t sync in the way I wanted. I now have separate settings repositories for each product. This seems to be working better, although, it does require copying new shortcuts to each product.

I haven’t tried solely using IntelliJ Ultimate, so maybe I will see if I can configure that to work for different programming languages. I have been reluctant to do so, because the appeal of IntelliJ for me is that it makes it easy to work with a programming language. I don’t want to have to configure IntelliJ Ultimate when I want to use Kotlin or want to use Python. Maybe it has a nice way of handling that?