# How likely is DataSpell to become a good IDE for Julia

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-likely-is-dataspell-to-become-a-good-ide-for-julia/72647>\
**Category:** Tooling\
**Created:** [December 6, 2021, 11:12am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-likely-is-dataspell-to-become-a-good-ide-for-julia/72647 "2021-12-06T11:12:38Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 8\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![SamBrand](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c37758/32.png) [@SamBrand](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/SamBrand)\
**Post date:** [December 6, 2021, 11:12am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-likely-is-dataspell-to-become-a-good-ide-for-julia/72647/1 "2021-12-06T11:12:38Z")

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Hi everyone!

Bit of a speculative/idle query here.

My brother spends his time raving about JetBrains products, however, IntelliJ + Julia plug-in is no where near as useful as Atom/Juno or (especially) VS-Code/Julia.

I note that Julia is explicitly mentioned on the page for DataSpell IDE [here](https://www.jetbrains.com/dataspell/), as a to-be-supported language:

> Once Python support is polished enough, we’ll also look at other languages one by one, e.g. first R, then Julia, and then others.

Any insider gossip on this? Is this likely to end up being a useful IDE and I should keep my eye on it (I’m an academic btw).

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**Author:** ![Palli](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/palli/32/3380_2.png) [@Palli](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Palli)\
**Post date:** [December 6, 2021, 2:29pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-likely-is-dataspell-to-become-a-good-ide-for-julia/72647/2 "2021-12-06T14:29:56Z")

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I hadn’t heard of DataSpell, that seems new. I not it’s for Jypyther notebooks, that support Julia, R and more, both part of its name, i.e. Jy- for Julia.

So it’s not a replacement for other IDEs not related to notebooks. JetBrains still has other products for that, and this one only for notebooks, while then they claim this is better.

It’s the first I see JetBrains mention Julia, and it’s great Julia is on their radar, seemingly next, as I already see there: “Basic support for R includes a debugger …”

I believe the plugin isn’t they’re work, completely independent: [Julia - IntelliJ IDEs Plugin | Marketplace](https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/10413-julia)

Note also you may want to use Pluto.jl (or Neptune.jl) rather than Jypyther, unless DataSpell will be that good to change the picture…

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**Author:** ![SamBrand](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c37758/32.png) [@SamBrand](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/SamBrand)\
**Post date:** [December 6, 2021, 3:13pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-likely-is-dataspell-to-become-a-good-ide-for-julia/72647/3 "2021-12-06T15:13:11Z")

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It is new… like you I’m finding it encouraging that Julia is on the radar of these people developing “data science” tools.

I’m ok with using Pluto on my browser. I’m an epidemic modeller, this pandemic I’ve got a workflow where I test out the basic transmission model(s) in Pluto.

But thats only about 5-10% of the effort… most is data wrangling and inference. So once I’m very happy that the basic transmission model makes sense over a range of tests and parameter settings (Pluto is an amazing environment for doing this in), then I use VS-Code/Julia IDE to develop a package for doing data input, parallelising inference etc.

Not got a problem with VS-code/Julia at all, but I’ve heard a lot of people from commercial development really rate JetBrains products. So quite excited to see how good their Julia-for-DataSpell-IDE ends up being.

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**Author:** ![Palli](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/palli/32/3380_2.png) [@Palli](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Palli)\
**Post date:** [May 16, 2023, 2:03pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-likely-is-dataspell-to-become-a-good-ide-for-julia/72647/4 "2023-05-16T14:03:59Z")

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For sure VS Code is most popular IDE for Julia (thereafter Atom) and I never really heard of people using IntelliJ (for Julia), despite me now getting a “Popular Link” notification for that old link in this old discussion… It’s simply not needed (nor preferred? in any way?), nor DataSpell? I didn’t really look into DataSpell, what’s its closest competitor for Julia?

FYI: I see for [Julia - IntelliJ IDEs Plugin](https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/10413-julia) 0.4.2:

> Updated 2 years ago  
> Feb 23, 2021

> 0.4.1  
> Update grammar-kit/kotlin/intellij-gradle-plugin

I understand IntelliJ is great for Java (and Android, I think Android Studio based on it, and then for Kotlin too). That doesn’t mean it’s as useful for Julia, unless possibly if you would use Julia with Java or e.g. Kotlin, so possibly with Android. You can use Julia with Java (with JavaCall.jl except on Android; or use it for e.g. Scala/Spark also done).

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**Author:** ![e3c6](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e79b87/32.png) [@e3c6](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/e3c6)\
**Post date:** [March 7, 2024, 8:42pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-likely-is-dataspell-to-become-a-good-ide-for-julia/72647/5 "2024-03-07T20:42:52Z")

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So it seems DataSpell has went through a couple of releases. I wonder if Julia support is coming soonish?

I do like vscode Julia, but sometimes I feel the Jupyter notebooks in vscode do not behave optimally. Would be nice to see what DataSpell brings to the table.

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**Author:** ![Palli](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/palli/32/3380_2.png) [@Palli](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Palli)\
**Post date:** [March 8, 2024, 11:24am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-likely-is-dataspell-to-become-a-good-ide-for-julia/72647/6 "2024-03-08T11:24:37Z")

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> [@SamBrand](#):
>
> I note that Julia is explicitly mentioned on the page for DataSpell IDE [here](https://www.jetbrains.com/dataspell/), as a to-be-supported language:
> 
> > Once Python support is polished enough, we’ll also look at other languages one by one, e.g. first R, then Julia, and then others.

Where do you see that? I can’t see it there, think that text, and therefor Julia has been abandoned as a plan, and searching for Julia finds me almost nothing:

> **[Julia - IntelliJ IDEs Plugin | Marketplace](https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/10413-julia)**
>
> Julia language support. Chinese video instructions: av20155813 English video instructions: Click to visit You're encouraged to contribute to the plugin in any form if...

See comments there:

> #### [Ivan Aksamentov](https://plugins.jetbrains.com/author/6a7facf8-7bcf-416c-9887-4527972e998a) 05.02.2024
> 
> I’ve been able to get the plugin working by installing an older version of PyCharm, separately for Julia only, while preserving the latest version of PyCharm for other projects.
> 
> According to the “Versions” tab, the latest version of the Julia plugin (0.4.2), released Feb 23, 2021, supports IntelliJ platform version 2020.1+ [https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/10413-julia/versions](https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/10413-julia/versions)
> 
> I downloaded PyCharm 2020.1.5 from here: [Other Versions - PyCharm](https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/download/other.html#2020.1) extracted the archive, ran ./bin/pycharm.sh and installed this plugin there. The old version of PyCharm can live alongside the latest version of PyCharm and it uses separate config directory at ~/.config/JetBrains/PyCharm2020.1, so there will be no conflicts between versions and you can use the older version specifically for Julia, while using the latest version for your other languages. […]
> 
> I am definitely voting against removing this plugin from the Marketplace, as proposed by other reviewers, because it still works fine on older platforms.

but earlier:

> #### [Samuel Mathieu](https://plugins.jetbrains.com/author/01e9687d-89b7-4662-a940-168a7f12f000) 20.08.2023
> 
> No longer maintained. (Should this plugin be removed from marketplace?) […]

VS Code is the way to go. I also want to see what happens with Zed editor and Julia… but most likely any replacement will need to support VS Code extensions, at least Julia’s which is only made for it.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![e3c6](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e79b87/32.png) [@e3c6](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/e3c6)\
**Post date:** [March 8, 2024, 2:50pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-likely-is-dataspell-to-become-a-good-ide-for-julia/72647/7 "2024-03-08T14:50:34Z")

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> [@Palli](#):
>
> Where do you see that? I can’t see it there, think that text, and therefor Julia has been abandoned as a plan, …

I also remember seeing Julia mentioned, right after Python and R, in the DataSpell webpage.

Note that the IntelliJ plugin is really something else. I agree that vscode is much better than that.

But DataSpell is focusing on Jupyter notebooks (as far as I can tell). And I’m still curious if JetBrains eventually adds Julia support. But yeah, it’s strange they are no longer mentioning Julia in the DataSpell webpage … maybe they abandoned the idea of supporting Julia ☹

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Palli](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/palli/32/3380_2.png) [@Palli](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Palli)\
**Post date:** [March 8, 2024, 9:20pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-likely-is-dataspell-to-become-a-good-ide-for-julia/72647/8 "2024-03-08T21:20:29Z")

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> [@e3c6](#):
>
> But DataSpell is focusing on Jupyter notebooks

Ok, but I doubt they support Pluto.jl, and I believe it’s better (reactive) than Jupyter. Why would you use the latter? I guess you believe it’s better, or at least (could be) with tools for such as DataSpell.