Etienne has been progressing a lot of work on the D plugin for Intellij. If you use Intellij IDEA (CE or UI) then please install it from the plugin repo and give it a go.

Please direct any issues to the GitHub: https://github.com/intellij-dlanguage/intellij-dlanguage/

On Sunday, 20 July 2025 at 14:25:51 UTC, singingbush wrote:

Hello!

just for understanding/context:

• currently we are moving completely to the D-ecosystem - the language is just too fascinating and we love from what we saw and tested so far - even if it means that part/whole libraries need to be adapted/re-implemented in D.
• Looks like many packages will come out of that 'for public D support'
• The D-ecosystem is able to do a lot of things but is 'naturally' lacking IDE-Support and up to now we tried many :-) - currently going with VSCode, Visual Studio - and still analyzing Dexed, etc. with a solution structure that will hold 150+ 'projects' in total.

Some questions about Intellij - and D:

• Is there a solution/workspace management available that is better than the rest of IDE's?
• Is there tooling support - e.g. automatically moving a library with 'dub add-local..."?
• Any experience with improved intellisense support?
• What additional support for D would come with this IDE - in comparison to VSCode oder Visual Studio?

We are really considering to buy some licenses - according to the perspectives this can offer. I hope an answer at least would be in the category "look here, read there, watch this YT..." and not in the category "download and try for yourself" - at least at first.

Thanks for an honest and pushing answer!

Best regards, Yamolo

On Sunday, 3 August 2025 at 19:52:09 UTC, Yamolo wrote:

To some degree it comes down to which editor you prefer. VSCode with webfreak's code-d is a good combo. I've not tried Visual D in a long time but I believe it's pretty good. The Intellij plugin, like most D plugins, has relied on some cli tools that hackerpilot developed some years ago (mostly DCD). Moving forward the Intellij plugin is becoming less reliant on external tools so at some point those integrations may be removed. A lot of work has been done to overhaul the parser which has greatly improved resolving definitions of variables, classes, etc.

It is currently best suited to dub projects and I suspect that's true of most of the D plugins out there. It can certainly be used without dub but that requires the user to be more familiar with Intellij.

As it stands now the plugin should work well for anyone familiar with Jetbrains IDE's and have some basic knowledge of dlang tooling. If you're not already familiar with Intellij then this plugin may not be the option for you.

On Monday, 4 August 2025 at 19:09:29 UTC, singingbush wrote:

Thank you very much for your answer. I took some time to generate for information on our side. We decided that we will test it and send some feedback in here.

The additional story is that D is very inspiring - with all it's own things that come down the pipeline (build tools, round trip IDE-support, etc. but therefore more "on the metal" of all things) - but carries some problems with it that need and will be addressed from our side. Could even be that we decide to take some effort to bring things further publicly, e.g. currently investigating in detail the more or less heavy effort for a full round trip WYSIWYG-editor (design -> code -> design) for at least the dlangui framework with VSCode(IntelliJ) - we'll see - integration (exploring D way of Qt and Gtk also). But currently we hit into limits here and there when we talk about full RTTI/reflection support, etc. - but that's another discussion for another topic, but suggestions highly appreciated.

So, again, many thanks for your answer - trying, doing, deciding is still better than just thinking and staying where you are - that's clear so far. At least we got, again, the information from many sides that IntelliJ is totally worth a look into :-)