Previewing the IDE of the Future — Fleet

JetBrains recently released a preview version of their newest IDE, Fleet. Let’s take a look at it

Image by Percy Bolmér. Gopher by Takuya Ueda, Original Go Gopher by Renée French (CC BY 3.0)

I’ve been waiting a long time for JetBrains to release their new product Fleet. Quiet frankly, I’ve always found JetBrains products to be much more powerful than their competitors, but also very expensive for a good reason.

The IDE is one of the developer’s most important tooling; it is where we spend most of our time, and it is important to have a good tool.

I am a frequent Go developer, and GoLand always struck me as the most powerful editor.

So you might think I would be using Goland? I do have a license provided by my gracious employer, but I can’t stand using it. The UI looks so old and confusing that I can’t live with it. There are so many buttons, and everything is hidden behind some menu.

I have been super excited about Fleet however, imagine the power of IntelliJ’s products but with a nicer UI. That caught my eye. I know they can provide powerful products, but I would be sold if they could manage a better UI.

The product is still unfinished and has been in closed Beta for a while, but they recently released a public Preview. Let us download it and give it a spin!

You can use Fleet after downloading it on their website for free now during the preview.

To install it, you will need their software management application named Toolbox. Once you start the toolbox, you can find Fleet at the top for preview, which allows you to download it.

In this article, we will be exploring Fleet on a Go code base. The code can be found on my GitHub.

If you’d rather watch this article as a video, you can find it on my YouTube.

Previewing and Navigating the Code

The first screen that hits us is the workspace selection screen. In it, we can see the…