The New UI Becomes the Default in 2024.2

Alina Mishina

We are happy to announce that we will enable the new UI for all JetBrains IDE users in the upcoming 2024.2 version. We designed the new UI to reduce visual clutter, ensuring easy access to essential features while gradually revealing more advanced functionality as needed. The new UI is clean and modern, providing bigger, easier-to-use controls, a consistent color palette, light and legible icons, increased contrast, and better accents.

Work on the new UI began in 2021. We analyzed the issues with the old UI, carefully worked on solutions, released preview and Beta versions, gathered feedback, and conducted over 10 UX studies.

There was a lot of positive feedback from our users:

The new IntelliJ UI is so good. Minimalistic, modern, and still powerful, good job @jetbrains!

Wow, @WebStormIDE @jetbrains New UI is AWESOME, it looks very fresh.

I’ve been using it for a few weeks and I absolutely love it. The tiny interface elements in the old UI really felt out of place in modern desktop environments.

I’ve been using it for several weeks now with IntelliJ Ultimate, and I absolutely love it. I was afraid it was too minimal when I first started using it (I even went back to the “old look” for a little while), but after a few days, I realized everything I needed was still right where I needed it (and when I needed it), and all I’ve lost is the distractions. Everything works, and the look and feel is fresh, responsive and (ok, I’ll say it) modern.

Of course, there was also negative feedback, and it greatly helped us make the new UI better – we fixed more than 2,000 bugs and made numerous improvements. For example, we added a compact mode, removed the bright blue Run button from the toolbar, added the ability to easily customize the main toolbar, added an option to enable tool window names, and polished color themes.

For more information about the main changes in the new UI, see the documentation. For known issues and future plans, see the Knowledge Base.

Currently, 87% of our users have adopted the new UI, despite it not being the default option for existing users.

How long will we continue to support the old UI?

The classic UI is available as a plugin in JetBrains Marketplace. Starting with the 2024.2 version, you will see a popup with the link to the plugin, or you can find the plugin in Settings | Plugins.

We plan to support the plugin for at least one year, which means that we will test and release it with every major IDE release. We will evaluate the new UI adoption rate and feedback, and based on this information, we will decide how long we will continue to support the classic UI.

Unfortunately, the Classic UI plugin won’t work correctly with Gateway and when running the IDEs remotely.

Resources

We published the Int UI Kit and Icons pack for the new UI. Currently, we are updating the UI Guidelines to refer to the new UI.

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