Introducing the Fleet Public Preview

JetBrains has announced a public preview of Fleet, its new IDE and lightweight code editor. JetBrains announced Fleet last November to huge interest, with over 137,000 people signing up for a private preview.

The JetBrains team says Fleet’s goal is to make the best simple IDE and lightweight code editor to provide a tool that is instantly available for simple tasks. Fleet was built using the IntelliJ platform as a back-end, a completely new user interface, and a distributed architecture.

Fleet recognizes the type of project being edited and has features based on it, and also supports collaborative development. Remote development is also supported by running the back end in the cloud or on a remote server, which means you can write code without having to set up a local environment.

If a developer finds they need more, there is a button that will launch the IntelliJ IDE to get a full editor with code handling, project and context-sensitive code completion, navigation to definitions and functions, refactoring, on-the-fly code quality checks, and quick fixes.

Fleet currently supports the following languages: Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, Rust, and JavaScript. JetBrains plans to add support for other languages.

The Fleet team says that while not all the features of other JetBrains products will be in the new IDE, they just want to hear feedback from the developers on what they need. The plans include API and SDK support for plugin authors, perfomance acceleration, themes and hotkeys.