Hi, I upgraded to the 14.1 yesterday and for the first time in 10+ year history of using IDEA I'm afraid of changes coming. Please don't go too far with getting rid of shadows, borders and backgrounds!
I understand that flat designs are very fashionable nowadays, but design should not win in comparison with convenience of use. To be the most handy and easy-to-use as well as full-featured dev tool was a main goal of IDEA all this time. Please stick to that going ahead. Design fashion is a subject to change, while the application is losing the usability following it.
Colors are really needed to distinguish semantically different areas of the IDE screen and the new marker bar doesn’t make me optimistic. It doesn’t react on theme switching staying flat and transparent; new pale marker colors are also a try to look modern instead of making a bright warning to the user about the line status (which is actually a main purpose of these markers).
I beg you to stop visually ruin the IDE for the sake of today’s design trends. Please don’t end up as MS Outlook 2013 which is now a chaotic set of letters and monochrome icons on white background.
To summarize, please:
1) Do not remove backgrounds for the separate screen areas.
2) Do not change colors that have to be semantically bright.
3) Make design changes theme-dependent, so users who like the old L&F could continue use it.
Thank you.
P.S. Also I liked the eye icon checking my files :))