JetBrains is the company behind some of the most popular IDEs, including IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, and PhpStorm. Even Android Studio, Google’s sort-of in-house IDE for Android development, is based on IntelliJ.
While IntelliJ’s IDEs are popular for a reason (they’re good), they can be a little heavy at times. IntelliJ and Android Studio can take up a lot of resources just by being open, for instance. And if you’re compiling something, they’re going to use even more. You also can’t (yet) really run JetBrains stuff on mobile devices, since JetBrains doesn’t have easily-accessible ARM builds.
So what happens if you don’t have a powerful computer, or you don’t even have a computer? Normally, this would be where you’d look around for other IDEs that do work on ARM. But JetBrains kind of has a solution, and it’s called JetBrains Projector.
What is a projector?
You’ve probably heard of remote desktop or VNC before. It lets you interact graphically with a computer over a local network or even the internet. JetBrains Projector works a little like a remote desktop, but without some of the disadvantages.
To use JetBrains Projector, you do need a computer somewhere on the Internet to host it. This could be an AWS instance or a home server. You can then connect to it from any supported browser, including mobile Chrome and Firefox.
But instead of displaying an entire desktop and sending a video feed of that back to a connected client, JetBrains Projector sends over the information needed for the client to display an IDE as if it were displaying locally. This means there isn’t any compression or resolution scaling, so the IDE looks almost native.
Also, JetBrains Projector isn’t limited to just the official JetBrains IDEs. As long as you have an IDE that’s closely based on one from JetBrains, you can use it with JetBrains Projector. That includes Android Studio.
Why a projector?
The biggest reason you might want to do remote development is what I talked about in the introduction: What if you don’t have a powerful x86-based computer? You could buy a semi-powerful one specifically for development work, or you could spin up a cloud server and use JetBrains Projector.
It can also be useful if you just want to offload the resource requirements. For instance, I have a pretty powerful gaming laptop with an i7-9750H and 32GB of RAM. That’s plenty for even the large projects I deal with. But if I want to do something else on top of development that’s resource-intensive as well, like watching YouTube, playing a game? Then things start to fall apart.
But I have a Ryzen 7 5800X server with 32GB of RAM in it. So I installed JetBrains Projector on that. Now I can just open a new Chrome window and connect to it from my laptop without worrying about juggling resources. The server also builds much faster than my laptop, so it’s a win-win situation.
How is using a projector?
JetBrains Projector is meant to be hosted on a Linux machine. That doesn’t mean you can’t run it on macOS or on Windows with WSL, but you might run into some weird issues because of that.
To get it set up, all you need to do is head over to the Projector Installer GitHub repo and follow the instructions there. They’ll walk you through getting the dependencies installed and getting an IDE set up. There are even some WSL troubleshooting steps if you need them.
Then you can just connect to your server address using the correct port and token (if you set one), and now you have an IDE running on your device without any of the bloat.
