Harald,
I’m, afraid that for right now, we have no immediate plans to integrate Mercury or Elements with additional IDEs; we have looked at IntellliJ (which Raider is based on) in the past, but decided to not pursue it further.
The problem is that while terminology such as “the can implement a plugin” makes it sound super simple and trivial to “just add the language”, supporting an IDE, especially one not under rout control like Fire or Water, is a tremendous amount of work, in initial support and upkeep as things change/break.
The resources we spend on supporting Visual Studio are so disproportional to what goes into any other area of the product, it’s not even funny. You would not believe how things we can fix in Fire or Water in minutes, or implement in hours, take days up-on days to do for VS.
So we’re very hesitant to multiply that load by taking on new Ides with more problems. In addition, I’m afraid I can count the requests we have for IntelliJ support over the past decade on one hand and (this is just my personal opinion, of course), I find it — from my limited exposure to it via Android Studio, to be terribly bloated and unapproachable, worse even than Visual Studio.
Adding to that that the “feature” of supporting IntelliJ/Raider as an IDE would essentially mean asking our potential customers to make an additional purchase from what, in many ways, is a competitor, this doesn’t really make it a very attractive option for us, on any front :(.
Far less resources (though still more than we can spare right now; I’m just putting this out there to put into perspective just how much work it is) would be to create our own designer(s), rather than integrate with a new IDE (mostly) just to get to use theirs.
We do continue to explore options for UI designers, both native ones and the option of a c ross-platform UI model, though. And @Theo69’s third=party Unified GUI project is also coming along…
For now, the preferred/recommended options remains to shell out tithe native platform designers, even when working from Fire/Water — via the Xcode and Android Studio sync feature, for those platforms, and by just opening the project in VS, for .NET.
I hope this makes sense.
—marc