JetBrains Unveils Fleet: A Lightweight IDE for Remote Development

IDE Supports Front‑Back Separation

JetBrains has begun separating the front‑end and back‑end of its IDEs, allowing developers to write code on one machine while the source code, toolchain, and IDE back‑end run on another. This is achieved with the new JetBrains Gateway launcher, which connects to a remote host via SSH and currently supports Linux physical machines and virtual machines as servers.

The JetBrains client runs locally, providing the UI for the IDE back‑end. Built on the IntelliJ platform, it offers the same editor, code completion, navigation, inspections, and refactoring tools as a full IntelliJ IDE, but all files are hosted remotely and all compilation and execution occur on the remote server.

Remote development is presented as a way to leverage powerful cloud‑based servers, create reproducible clean environments, and avoid the risk of losing a laptop packed with important source code.

Remote development is currently available only in IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate (not the free Community edition) and requires developers to install user plugins both locally and remotely. JetBrains is exploring the ability to install plugins remotely via the JetBrains Client.

Gateway is bundled with IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, PyCharm Professional, GoLand, PhpStorm, and RubyMine, and can also be used independently with CLion and WebStorm.

Lightweight IDE Fleet

While JetBrains IDEs are feature‑rich, they are not lightweight. Microsoft Visual Studio Code offers a professional IDE experience with a lighter footprint, prompting developers to ask when JetBrains would release a similar lightweight editor. JetBrains answered with Fleet, a new product positioned as a competitor to VS Code.

Fleet opens as a plain‑text editor; when Smart Mode is enabled, it connects to a backend based on IntelliJ IDEA or the Language Server Protocol, providing refactoring, syntax highlighting, autocomplete, and class information.

Fleet also supports collaborative development across multiple clients connected to the same backend.

Fleet currently supports Java, Kotlin, Python, Go, JavaScript, Rust, TypeScript, and JSON, with PHP, C++, C#, and HTML slated for future release.

New Space Tool

JetBrains has also introduced a Docker‑based development environment within its Space platform, which runs on JetBrains servers. Space can prepare backend work, clone Git repositories, build project indexes, and resolve dependencies, providing a ready‑to‑use IDE environment as if someone had arrived an hour early to set everything up.

If a user does not interact with the environment for 30 minutes, the container automatically shuts down while preserving unsaved changes. The container currently supports a single repository. Virtual machines are offered with 4, 8, and 16 CPU cores paired with 8, 16, and 32 GB of memory, priced at $0.40, $0.80, and $1.60 per hour respectively, with storage costing $0.008 per hour.