I personally didn't like the new UI, I prefer the old one, and switched back immediately when I saw it after upgrading. I will stay until they eventually force me to use the new one. From the comments in that blog post it seems I'm not the only one.

UI changes can be very polarizing. It was bold of them to make the change. I can understand why it would put you off if you don't like it.

I really enjoy their new UI, it is so much more practical and spacious.

Looks heavily inspired by VS Code to me

Agree, first thing it came to my mind looking at the screenshot.

I saw this when it got posted and all I think is...Are you kidding?

That UI is absolutely horrid. Everything is hidden. It is complete and utter unusable garbage that has no business being in an application being used by professionals.

> Meanwhile, the UI trends in the industry have evolved,

No, they've devolved. That's what this entire thread is about.

> and many of our new users tell us that the UI appears heavyweight

Your "new users" are likely your lowest common denominator user. They're beginners at coding and haven't learned all the things that they're going to want a single click away.

> and dated.

Dated? Dated is good.

> Our goals were to reduce visual complexity

A goal that sounds noble, but really isn't.

> provide easy access to essential features

By hiding them behind unintuitive buttons that don't even have any text? Just a meaningless icon?

> It's the first time I've seen a step in the right direction for a long time.

110% disagree. They dumbed down the UI considerably.

> There is so much more room.

Even in 1080p, I think JetBrains IDEs have just enough room. In 1440p, it's great. I upgraded to 4K recently and I have more room than I know what to do with.

Are you using a 14" laptop monitor or something?

> Our goals were to reduce visual complexity

Complexity can be reduced to zero by shipping a blank page.

But everything is still clickable and swipable. The program still has as many features, but it's not visually complex: we don't show them to you. Want to commit your changes? Just click on the white space about three quarters of the way left to right, and two centimetres down from the top of the screen. About 50 pixels right of this, we have conveniently placed click listener that will revert all your changes. But don't worry, in the name of eliminating visual clutter, this click listener is entirely invisible.

I work on two 24" 1080p monitors. I find most IDEs take up too much space with menus I hardly use.

> There is so much more room.

I don’t understand what’s being gained in some cases. For example, their UIs used to have sideways buttons with icons and labels in the gutters on the left and right. Now it’s icons only and a bunch of blank space. I don’t get any extra usable space and now I have to memorize a new set of icons and remember what they do.

What’s behind the hamburger menu in the left gutter and why can’t it be made directly accessible as icons in all that free space?

All of it reminds me of the versions of Chrome where the “show all downloads” action on the downloads page was by itself under a hamburger menu while the row in the UI was basically blank.

I greatly prefer the new UI. Vertical text is annoying to read so you'd end up memorizing it anyway and it makes it more cluttered, which is the last thing I want when I want to focus on the code. Clickable areas were also much smaller, which meant you'd have to be more precise with the mouse, which is quite annoying.

Yeah I feel exactly the same as you. I prefer JetBrains to VSCode because it gives me labelled icons and menus for the things I want to do. It's true, for the things I don't do often sometimes I have to search a busy menu, but that compares with trying to remember what the name of the command might be in the VSCode command panel, so it seems a lot more user-friendly. Do people actually like being confused? Do people like having to use Google to find out what words to type to use their software?

I come from vim, notepad++, and sublime text. I love seeing lots of code at once. I want to see as much context around the code as possible.

Admittedly when I'm at home on my bigger screens I don't value space as much as I do on my small work screens.

It seems we've moved from people hating the horizontal ribbon at the top to loving vertical ribbons on the left and right...