JetBrains

I would never call myself a real programmer, but I have a healthy obsession with studying new languages that emerge, especially those that arrive with little baggage and attempt to solve current problems and new use cases. This brought about my explorations in recent years of Swift and Kotlin, both initially aimed to fix issues with the languages traditionally used in their worlds, but rapidly became used in more widespread contexts, and generally, have enthusiastic communities.

JetBrains is known for its variety of developer-focused IDEs, all based around its IntelliJ core. In recent years, they developed their own writer-focussed plugin, Grazie, for handling grammar and style guidance, Writerside for a wide variety of tech writing tasks, and more recently, an AI assistant for writers. The company has also helped with community-maintained plugins such as those for markdown and asciidoc. But then, a year or so ago, JetBrains announced that Writerside would become a fully-fledged tech writing IDE. I've been using it on and off for some time, and in this post, I take a look at some of its features, recent updates, and related plugins.