JetBrains Releases Distributed and Lightweight IDE Fleet

JetBrains has released a new IDE in which code can be written both locally and remotely. Fleet is a lightweight editor that the company says is aimed at developers who want an all-round application.

The tool is called Fleet and can be downloaded as a preview. JetBrains says the tool includes all the features users would expect from an IDE, such as syntax highlighting and automatic code completion, as well as debugging and refactoring. Fleet also has an integrated terminal, support for Git, and port forwarding. Plugins will be available in the future. According to the company, the codebase has been completely rebuilt and Fleet therefore only exists as a standalone IDE instead of being integrated into IntelliJ Idea. Fleet can be used on Windows, macOS and Linux.

For now, developers can get started with eight languages ​​and formats in the editor. Java, JavaScript, Python, Go, Rust, and Kotlin are supported, along with TypeScript and Json. HTML, PHP, C++ and C# will also be supported in the future, although it is not known when this will happen.

According to JetBrains, the tool is built in such a way that it can be used in a distributed manner. There is an architecture for both the front and backend, and users can set up a workspace server and a file system server. This allows users to set up the IDE on their own machine, but also load the code from another machine. The latter can only be done via ssh on Linux servers, although VMs are also included. This remote development is also implemented in all tools of JetBrains’ IntelliJ platform.

For the latter, JetBrains has released Space. This is a platform with which developers can work from a Docker environment that runs on the servers at JetBrains. For example, users can clone Git repos or set up indexes in it. Such containers can handle only one repository.