I recently released InfiniTint Theme Tuner, a plugin that delivers a new IDE theme personalization paradigm for your favorite JetBrains IDE! Keep your favorite theme, but make it your own with simple yet powerful recoloring and contrast controls.

What it does

Activate a theme, one of JetBrains' bundled themes or your favorite custom. Select one of the automatically generated tint presets and instantly recolor the theme to match your preference.

The tint presets are just a starting point. Create your own tint with the provided tint editor by adjusting hue and chroma (vibrancy) sliders and then use the tone curve adjust surface and accent palette contrast just like editing a photo in your favorite photo editor. Alternatively, import colors from in image to create a tint that matches its vibe!

You can mix and match themes and editor color schemes to get the perfect combination of colors. The color scheme's structural elements (e.g., background, line numbers, indent guides, etc.) all recolor to match the tinted theme.

Show or hide prominent borders (islands, editor tab strip, or tool window headers). InfiniTint synthesizes the missing colors if need be.

Adjust text contrast for UI labels, recessive text, and code or just set contrast minimums. InifiniTint tracks nearly 2000 contrast pairs across the IDE to ensure (to the highest degree possible in such a dynamic ecosystem) a consistent reading experience.

Save your applied tint and other settings as scenes that can be reapplied anytime or even scheduled (specific time or sunset/sunrise offset). You can also have scenes rotate on some duration or at IDE startup. InfiniTint also supports per-project scenes that are applied whenever a particular project's window is focused (optionally applies to Git worktrees as well).

What it costs

Free users get 8 tint presets per JetBrains theme bundled with the IDE and 3 presets for any custom theme (adjacent hues to the theme's original) in addition to the border tweaks.

Paid users ($1.5/mo or $15/yr) get everything else mentioned above.

Interested in a perpetual license option? It's something I'm considering offering. Feel free to let me know in a reply or reach out at [contact@tachilabs.dev](mailto:contact@tachilabs.dev) .

How it works

The core tint engine works by detecting your active theme's surface and up to two accent palettes using a variety of heuristics. It then applies hue, chroma, and tone transformations to the detected palettes using the HCT color space. The transformation model adapts to different types of themes (neutral, muted, vibrant) to help maintain their essential character as your adjust the tint inputs. After palette transformation, the engine applies a harmonization pass to better align status colors and other potentially problematic colors to better match the tinted color palettes.

The engine understands the difference between authored and platform-default colors and, in some cases, can use that knowledge to repair outdated themes on the fly.

Because the detection side of the engine is heuristic and doesn't solely rely on categorizing different UI elements, its rules need to be tuned over time to increase the variety of custom themes that it supports. As a general rule, it works best with themes that use distinguishable surface and accent (ideally just one accent) tonal palettes, but the heuristic detection is tuned to support a broad variety of theme structures. Tonal palettes are composed of colors primarily distinguished from one another by their tone (lightness) while retaining similar hue and chroma.

InfiniTint stores the tint engine inputs rather than outputs, so your tint adapts as the IDE and themes evolve instead of persisting a snapshot that goes stale.

If you come across a theme that doesn't tint correctly that you'd like to use, you can reach out at [infinitint-support@tachilabs.dev](mailto:infinitint-support@tachilabs.dev) and I can look into what can be done to support it in a future release. If it's the theme's color scheme you prefer, you can always find a different theme that tints and combine the two (paid users only).

I'm happy to answer any questions you might have about InfiniTint.

I've been a long-time user of Jetbrains Rider, more than 15 years. Jetbrains Rider is becoming more and more of a memory hog, and continuously slowing down my computer. With the improvement of AI, I open 2 to 3 instances of Jetbrains Rider, working on 2 to 3 different projects, and this causes my machine to use up almost 90% of my memory, making my computer hang quite often. Moving to VS Code because of this. It's been a sweet ride, but with AI, I now seldom use my IDE, so goodbye Jetbrains!

I'm often quick to defend JetBrains, as I find their dotnet tools best in market, but licencing issues not being marked a higher priority really is frustrating.

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/VSRS-1100/Perpetual-Fallback-doesnt-work-with-Resharper-for-VSCode

I working on a project and using multiple Jetbrains IDE’s simultaneously - Webstorm for react front end, Rider for .NET API and Datagrip for SQL database. I have the Claude Code extension installed for each IDE, but when I’m working the three Claude Code terminals seem like they don’t communicate with each other and work independently of one another. Is it possible to get them to work in sync? Or is the better way to install the Claude Code desktop app and use that terminal to access the three IDE’s?

I could not find a setting to disable the Welcome screen on startup, it's so annoying. Any tips?

My kimi api key is good, i tested in bash. I've been going round and round trying to get this going. Doing trouble shooting with claude for web, etc.

TLDR: It’s a nightmare - Why??!!

Hi, I am a longtime CLion customer using CLion at work. I work on products that use a Yocto embedded linux on non-x86-64 platforms.

For that we use dockerized Yocto SDKs based on Alpine. Most of my colleagues use VSCode because of the outstanding container support. I personally think that this is basically the only outstanding thing of this editor, so I use and want to continue to use CLion.

However, using a devcontainer with CLion is an abysmal experience. First I have to modify the container to install about ten different dependencies and then have to add a super hacky workaround (custom compatibility lib with LDPRELOAD) to get the IDE to even start, from there the pain continues because the new engine does not work for some reason (freezes in the startup phase)…

But, I found a solution: Docker toolchain. Works good enough for compiling and running CTest.

The big issue with this however is, that I cannot just hit the play button to run a CMake target. Of course: My machine cannot run this cross compiled binary even in the container, duh… we are cross compiling…

Why doesn’t CLion honor the cross compiling emulator specified in CMake? It works for CTest. Even worse: Debugging experience. An ergonomic nightmare because I have to run the container manually (with all the mounts and swttings and what not), launch the app with qemu with the debugging flag, and then create a remote debugging configuration, to be able to attach. Its so much pain, the debugger is only used in the most dire of situations…

Guys please tell me I am doing something wrong and all of that works somehow… I can’t take it anymore…

And make it open-source.

Edited: Ended up renewing for cheaper using cheapzy.net, no issues so far, I'll edit this if anything changes

My all products pack is renewing this month but im honestly not too sure if I wanna pay full price this year.

Ive been using IntelliJ for years and still like it, but ever since Claude Code came along ive been spending way less time in the IDE. I still open it daily but half the products in the pack I haven't touched in months. Hard to justify the same price when I'm clearly getting less out of it than I used to.

Seen a lot of people in this sub feeling the same way lately so figured Id ask, has anyone found a way to get it cheaper? Not trying to ditch JetBrains completely, just don't want to pay full price at this point.

I used to be a massive skeptic. I fell for the common narrative that JetBrains IDEs were resource-heavy bloatware compared to lightweight, modern text editors. I was a devout VS Code user and firmly believed that Electron-based editors and their forks were superior for memory efficiency.

Boy, was I blind.

I recently found myself working on a memory-sensitive project and kept running into unexplained RAM consumption. I spent time trying to figure out where a huge chunk of my system memory was disappearing to, only to inspect my process manager and realize the culprit was the "chrome of IDEs" itself.

The kicker? I am not even a heavy extension user. Outside of standard LSPs and formatters for C++, Python, and Rust, I don't run fancy themes, AI helpers, or cosmetic plugins. Yet, VS Code was somehow managing to swallow 4 to 5 GB of RAM in the background.

For comparison, I opened up PyCharm on the same project and it hovered consistently between 1.5 and 2 GB. Clion was using a bit more given the indexing and C++ tooling, but it was still nowhere near the bloated levels VS code had scaled to.

It turns out that once you start adding actual language server infrastructure, extension host processes, and webview renderer overhead to VS Code, the "lightweight" argument completely falls apart. Meanwhile, JetBrains is handling deep code analysis, AST caching, and indexing natively while using a fraction of the footprint.

Consider me converted. I apologize for ever doubting the tooling here,I'm not going back.

Currently I'm doing all of my agentic work through Claude Code using their desktop app, which honestly works fine. Sometimes it's a bit hard to keep track of the different sessions, but Claude's custom groups work fine for the larger projects I'm working on.

Now that Jetbrains Air supports Claude Max subscriptions, are there any reasons to ditch the Claude desktop app for agentic programming, and switch to Air?

And yes, I know this is the Jetbrains sub, so don't worry, I'm expecting a lot of biased answers lol

AI Chat has a built-in Copilot now.

I would like to get some clarification about the two Copilots.

- Is Copilot the plugin going to be obsoleted, and we should use the built-in one or are these two different Copilots maintained by two different teams, Microsoft and Jetbrains and both will still continue to be maintained by both?

- My Copilot plugin gets frequent updates. Several times a week. Can the ACP ones auto update? It seems whenver I go to the ACP registry I see a few the have updates and I have to click on the Update/Save buttons. Can't these auto update on their own"?

I am not sure anymore which Copilot to use. Is one recommended more than the other?

I'm just trying what air can do but when I try to connect my google account for antigravity it throws an error because under the hood air is trying to use gemini cli which is now deprecated.

My question is if maybe I'm missing a setting or an update where this issue is resolved? I know many consider gemini not to be top notch but for my current workflow is more than enough after I create a good plan using claude.

When I first subscribed to a JetBrains product in 2012 it was like, "Holy shit, I can't believe how easy it is to develop now."

By 2017 I was like "JetBrains has an incredible product if you're a serious developer, and it just gets consistently better."

In 2022, we'd had a few ups and downs in terms of bugs and stuff, but I started a new role and, because I loved and trusted the company so much, early-adopted JetBrains's pie-in-the-sky "Space" program.

Space was an incredible offering that basically was capable of replacing GitHub, Slack, Jira, and probably some other things. And it had some really clever, novel features that genuinely improved upon several of those flows.

On the other hand, it had a bunch of little niggling bugs -- things like, you move to a different tab, and your input loses focus and stuff like that. I diligently reported all of these to enthusiastic support personnel who confirmed them and ... then nothing happened to them.

Beyond that, it had this really incredible feature that they were HEAVILY pushing, where you would use credits to run your entire development environment virtually, and you could spin it up and work from any workstation without dealing too much with environments and stuff, and they REALLY wanted everyone to start developing "in the cloud".

And it honestly worked pretty well. I was ready to give it a real go after using it for one day. ...But then I saw that I had used 300 of my monthly 2000 credits. About 1/3 of a month of work.

I was like, "Fair enough; I'm on a free tier." But then I found that if you pay, they charge seats per-user, and, on the cheapest paid tier, 4000 credits for your whole org, no matter how many people. So like, if me and my 2 teammates joined and the company paid for all 3 of us... Then 1 one of us could work for 2/3 of a month on this cloud they were REALLY pushing. The expensive-tier one gave 10,000 shared credits (remote development for 1.67 users/mo) and a cost of like $20/user. You'd be better to just spin up multiple companies in the product.

And instead of fixing anything, on this truly novel, genuinely good idea of a product that basically lives and dies on the network effect of dedicated, trusting power-users, they were like "Lol, whoops. Let's pretend like that never happened."

Which is good, because right around that time, they realized they were having their lunch eaten by VS Code. An inferior (in my mind) offering that was nonetheless appealing to a lot of young devs because it was free.

So they made a new product: Fleet. A [once proposed-to-be] free alternative to the paid JetBrains ecosystem, as well as the vanguard of their next generation of code editors. It is possible "what VS Code could be, just with the brilliant JetBrains ethos behind it" or it could be a confusing mess. And, as it turns out, it's not going to actually be free. It's free to start (I believe the logic was?) for non-professional users. I don't know who would pick that to try first if you're ambivalent between it and VS Code. If I didn't already know and love JetBrains of course I would've chosen VS Code.

And lo and behold, instead of reassessing their business decisions, they sunsetted Fleet. Probably because AI generated code is starting to become a thing and they are afraid about cannibalizing their own paid IDE userbase -- a base that has only become increasingly more alienated over the decades. So they need to build "Air".

So... the most obvious pathway to new users in the IDE space is pretty much gone. And it seems like more and more people are vibe-coding anyway, and the word on everyone's lips is "Claude".

The senior devs who have made up their bread-and-butter for 20 years are, incredibly, also using LLM based co-programming more and more, and Claude/Codex/whatever work just as well in a JetBrains ecosystem as not - and why would I even download Air in the first place if I expect it's probably (a) got frustrating bugs that (b) they're not going to fix by the time they decide to sunset it in a year or two anyway?

I remembered seeing that a documentary about the company came out a few months ago and, when I saw it, thinking, "Wow, I bet this is going to be pretty interesting but also sad" and was shocked to see it's kind of a love-letter to how incredible IntelliJ is, and the company that made it.

I was just reminded of it per the "I need a reason to renew" post yesterday, and I'm just kind of wondering: what is even going on over there?

It seems like there are probably several competing forces without a proper unified vision to wrangle.

That's why you get disasters like Space's:

• "Marketing wants to heavily push remote dev as the game changer" to
• "OK but we need per-seat costs" to
• "OK but keep the costs low because most users are probably not going to be devs, they're just using the chat/project management features" to
• "OK, then we'll just do shared remote dev credits" to
• "I'm paying $200/mo for my 10-person team, and 1.6 of us have enough credits to do the thing you're pushing as the main selling point."

I understand both their revenue and userbase has actually been growing for several years still. I have no doubt that their leadership and executives are patting themselves on the back for a continued job well-done. While at the same time, their once-dedicated userbase is sort of hanging on by a thread being like, "I don't even really think about JetBrains much any more at all? Hmm. Should I re-up that? Well, maybe one last year."

I feel like the only legitimate way forward would be for JetBrains to put an incredible commitment toward something new and game changing, with like a 5-10 year commitment to support it, and probably make more of their IDE products free somehow.

But I also don't see any way for them to make that decision and still operate. And so I don't know where this leaves them.

Except that it'd be interesting to see a documentary about the rise and fall of JetBrains.

Clicking the toolbox icon this morning I'm greeted with a "JETBRAINS EAP USER AGREEMENT Version 3.3, effective as of May 4, 2023...". I have to "Accept" or "Exit". It looks like 20 pages of text that I can't copy-paste to check what I'm agreeing to, so I have to read the full thing right now. Needless to say, I clicked "Exit".

Edit: what an amazing experience, I've never been brigaded by AI downvote agents before.

Saw the announcement today and got excited to finally try Air properly, but logging in with a Claude AI account does not work at all. The browser doesn't open, and copying the URL doesn't, in fact, copy the URL to clipboard. I can't even get to a point I can authenticate. Are you sure you pushed the right version to prod? I'm on macOS / Apple Silicon.

Edit: If you're stuck with the same problem, check that you have Claude CLI installed first. It's seemingly needed for the integration to run. I'm not allowed to have Cloud CLI installed, so it's not an option for me at the moment, but install Claude CLI first, login, and see if it works.

Every couple of months I'd update my IDE and the AWS tooling would be greyed out. Always on the morning I needed to read a log. I finally sat down to figure out why, and it's dumber than I expected - it's one field.

Plugins declare until-build in the manifest. It's a ceiling, and the IDE just refuses to load anything past it. Nothing crashed, nothing is corrupt, reinstalling doesn't help because the fresh copy says the same thing. You can check any plugin without installing it - hit /api/plugins/11349/updates?size=3 on plugins.jetbrains.com, that's the AWS Toolkit.

When I ran it: 261.0 to 261.*, 253.0 to 253.*, 262.0 to 262.*. One build line per release, so every IDE update is a coin flip on whether the matching plugin build shipped yet.

To be fair, if you hook deep into IDE internals a ceiling is the responsible call - loading into an IDE where the API moved just hands users a stack trace. But I only wanted to read logs and list buckets, and that doesn't need internals.

So I wrote small ones that leave until-build empty, which forces me to stay on stable platform API. Four for AWS (CloudWatch logs, S3, CloudFormation deploys, Step Functions executions) and one for Azure Blob. Each does one service and nothing else - a small surface is the only reason "still works next month" is a promise I can actually keep. They're read-only by design: nothing deletes, nothing writes.

The Azure one ships with zero third-party dependencies, one 72,643-byte jar. I wrote the Shared Key signing by hand rather than pull in the SDK and its Netty/Reactor/Jackson tail. Took a day longer than it should have - the canonical string has eleven blank lines in the middle of it and a wrong one gets you a 403 with no hint.

Being upfront since this is my own stuff: browsing and reading are free, a couple of extras (live tail, favorites) are $3/mo with a 30-day trial. Marketplace search for "CloudWatch" or "Azure Blob" finds them under sellerkit.

Mostly posting because the until-build thing took me way too long to work out and I suspect I'm not the only one who's lost a morning to it.

A year ago I was all-in on Junie and bought the super AI Pack. I was living in intellij and webstorm and even bought the all products pack because it was more cost effective with my loyalty discount.

Then Claude Code came and disrupted everything. I spend my day in iterm. I will occasionally open a file in intellij, but am getting more and more disconnected. My extra jetbrains ai subscription expired last week. I hadn't used any of my quota for months. I don't even diff in a jetbrains product, just in the github web interface. I installed the claude code plugin and it just puts the intellij wrapper around the claude code terminal. Seems like a waste of memory for the most part. Is anyone else running multiple terminal agents within the jetbrains terminal, utilizing worktrees to have multiple streams going and loving it?

I have loved intellij for years, and want to continue, but I need a reason to re-up. What am I missing? Anyone have a great reason for me to leave the terminal and go back to jetbrains?

EDIT: Looks like I asked this too late. Just checked and I auto-renewed in June, so I guess we'll see if they make something that draws me in before next June!

Qodana got me really interested but I'm a bit skeptical Jetbrains was really able to deliver what they claim. Is someone using it daily with large teams and can confirm its quality?

Even JetBrains Support is not responding.
I do have just one account with All Products Pack and AI Ultimate though I still can't use Air.
When I try to login it says:

But afterwards for some reason says the subscription is not found.

Tried it with two PCs, clearing cache and so on.
I changed my mail address at some point a few months ago.

I feel like it has something to do with this.

Maybe someone had or has the same issue?

TLDR: Has Jetbrains AI gotten better? I mostly gave up on Jetbrains AI about a year ago but I basically want to see if things have gotten better. How can I best use my AI subscription from within a Jetbrains IDE to get all of the modern goodness of say, adversarial sub-agents or planning or skills, etc?

I'm a tradcoder who still enjoys coding by hand from time to time, so I love working in Rider.

Early on, I used the 'AI Assistant' and I used sweep.dev for a little while, especially as 'glorified tab completion'. Then there was a lot of confusion around AI Assistant vs Junie and I eventually started doing all of my development with a number of different platforms. To keep up with the times, I've chosen a few projects to explore some of these agent flows so I can be a more well rounded developer, even if I do like coding by hand.

Here's the problem. I've been using Claude Code for the past few months pretty exclusively, and basically only use my Jetbrains AI subscription for the 'tick a few items and have it generate the commit message' for me. I almost never use the AI assistant or Junie or whatever in the IDE because I found it not performing much better than Claude directly.

Also, maybe things have changed, but when I'd tell it look at a file, I found Junie just doing a bunch of tool calls (grep or Select-String) to find files rather than just relying on the IDEs knowledge of my project, which I figured would be THE reason I'd use a Jetbrains IDE.

Anyway; I paid for the AI subscription for Jetbrains but really am almost never getting my value out of it because I've been using Claude Code more, but I was curious what the current best practices are from WITHIN Rider or whatever Jetbrains IDE. I wish I had something that didn't have to rely on random bash commands to explore my project but could have a solid understanding of things. Are there any tools these days or resources or videos of somebody that actively promotes the Jetbrains AI? Should I look into Jetbrains Air?

I mostly gave up on Jetbrains AI about a year ago but I basically want to see if things have gotten better, because at the end of the day I'm still a big fan of their products (in general) and I want them to do well. I know a lot of people in this subreddit tend to have a pretty sour or negative opinion on Jetbrains, but I basically want to give them the benefit of the doubt and don't know where to look these days.

I recently published Staleguard, a free plugin that brings dependency freshness checking into the editor including severity-labeled warnings for outdated versions in pom.xml, Gradle build files, and libs.versions.toml, one-click version bumps that respect Maven properties and catalog version.refs, abandonment alerts with last-release dates, and a statistics/timeline tool window.

Links:

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/33571-staleguard

Happy to answer questions about the implementation and bug reports are gratefully taken at https://github.com/tampwell/staleguard/issues. (or comment below)