> It is so remarkably slow, and I cannot begin to understand these people that are telling me that it runs fast. Granted, I tend to run older hardware
Always hard to interpret these complaints when the author won't reveal what hardware they're talking about, other than that it's old.
I think Zed is a great option for someone who is both highly critical of load times and has older hardware. I would not have recommended a JetBrains IDE given this person's requirements and hardware situation.
I use JetBrains IDEs on a daily basis and it's not a problem for me, even on my M1 Apple Silicon machine which is, what, almost 6 years old now?
That said, I'm not hyper-sensitive to things like a loading screen that takes a few seconds. I open the IDE once or twice a day at most and then leave it open. I tested it just now and went from clicking to being in the IDE and editing a file in 3 seconds on a cold start (recently rebooted) on my 6 year old laptop. When I read these anecdotes I don't know if someone has a broken environment (too many plugins installed?), a really old machine, or if they're just so hyper-sensitive that a couple seconds of loading screen seen a few times a day is enough to trigger them.
That's a point well-taken, both non-obvious and relevant, but I'm still triggered by what I can only describe as dishonesty in the phrase quoted by GP. How can one "not understand" how other developers who clearly run (as most developers do) significantly faster hardware are not having the same issue? Unless one actively doesn't want to understand.
I’ve used WebStorm for around 6 or 7 years, coming from Sublime Text. WebStorm was noticeably slower, but it did a lot of extra things.
It still does, but it’s gotten really slow lately, locking for 3–4 seconds when scrolling a larger file. I’m also on an M1 Mac with 16GB of RAM.
I think the issue (mostly) stopped when I disabled the ESLint plugin and checks, and replaced it with Biome. WebStorm still gets a bit stuck on some files, can’t figure out why since their profiling report is a binary export.
Perhaps the author is complaining about a similar, recent slowdown. I’ve no AI plugins enabled, none of the debugger/JS profile tools, and use a custom no-color theme. WebStorm never felt slower.
Plugins are often to blame, I had some recurring issues with the full IntelliJ when opening multiple instances at the same time. I switched to Webstorm without any plugins for light editing without all plugins loaded, I have around 5 instances opened at all times without any issues on an old M1 Max
Text editors just format and display text. IDEs have compilers, debuggers, indexers, source control integration, analysis tooling, WSL integration, SSH integration, and whatever plugins you might have installed.
Does that definition of “text editor” still describe anything commonly used? Language servers cover a lot of that. SSH and source control are ubiquitous. I can’t think of anything in years I’ve heard of people using that would count as just a text editor.
Most popular text editors blurs the line these days. Vim can be the most straightforward text editor out there, or the most comprehensive IDE depending on how much you go into its environment. I keep Vs code bare bones and mostly use it as a text editor, but it only needs a dozen extensions to be a full fledged IDE.
It's not surprising to hear few true text editors because a text editor is more or less a solved problem. Notepad++ is 20 years old and still functions fine for those who want a pure text editor. Anyone making a modern text editor is either doing it to learn or to build up into an IDE later.
This is only a small part of what IDEs are doing. Also, even just formatting and displaying text is hella difficult. How many years was Zed in development until 1.0?
I had my (somewhat) breakup when they started advertising their code assistant at me. My IDE is my home. You push an advertisement at me and I get mad. I killed my subscription (with 1/2 a year left) and loaded the old version and haven't looked back. I will eventually give it up completely since new python versions aren't supported for debugging but oh well.
I quit auto-updating Jetbrains products years ago and it turned out to be a great decision for me. So many updates seemed to just shuffle around UI elements that I had memorized or worsen the performance. Now I only update when there's a specific reason to, and I'm not sure there ever will be a compelling reason to upgrade beyond my current versions; there's a good chance I'll do like the OP and find a more performant editor at that point.
I don't want to sound too negative since I do like their products, but it feels like they've fallen into the same trap as a lot of SAAS companies. They have to constantly make "improvements" to justify regular subscription fees. Their products were pretty great a decade ago. Since then they've made a gazillion changes but I can probably count on one hand the number of them that I found truly useful.
Performance issues haven't been as bad for me as the TFA says, but they certainly use a lot of resources, even after I aggressively removed a bunch of default plugins and disabled features I don't use. Performance improvements would be a nice feature, but those changes rarely make the top of the SAAS priority list.
I had my breakup with them when I realized that I always install vim keybindings for every editor I use and that Neovim plus plugins gives me the typical workflow I use. It became a no-brainer to lean into the LSP ecosystem (and DAP for debugging) and have the native version of the way I like to edit files.
It also helped that Neovim tends to consume minuscule amounts of resources compared to IntelliJ. I like the product Jetbrains developed, but I don't like how resource hungry it is—running JVM software is something I try to avoid, if possible.
Still using the Classic UI plugin, the new UI has horrible contrast and changes things for the sake of change. Also why does every new UI has horrible monochromatic icons where you have to guess what they are?
The persistent AI assistant sidebar that I have to remove every three days, the shitty "me too" VSCode clone UI, relegating the professional UI I paid for into a "maybe supported" plugin and then outright lying about the new UI being opt-in and never on by default.
JetBrains is simply not interested in power users and professionals anymore, and seem to be utterly unaware that that's their core customer base.
I canceled my all-products subscription after more than ten years and I'll be using 2024 versions until the wheels fall off.
It was also just plain strange. I don't know what they are doing to squeeze more money out of the tokens they sell, but using jetbrains' AI package always delivered significantly worse results for vs using the providers directly, and it was unbearably slow. But it appears that all of that falls on deaf ears at jetbrains, who are convinced that's the way forward, and they should become a vibe-coding system.
(Neo)vim or Emacs. Seriously. Pick one, get conversant in its basic commands. These are longstanding, Lindy-effect editors that are free software and independent of sponsorbuxx. If your IDE is your home, then going with some company's IDE, especially the proprietary ones, is like agreeing to live in an HOA where Ring service and smart home features that spy on you are a requirement.
> while JetBrains products are full-blown IDEs, with abilities Zed will never offer.
None of those matter if they just close the IDE before it indexes.
> When all of these tiny issues come together, it makes me NOT want to program. I don’t want to sit around and wait for startup times to get my ideas onto the screen. I don’t want to worry that my CPU or RAM is going to be exhausted and I am going to have to restart my machine. I want to open my editor and immediately enter a flow state. I want the tooling to assist me when useful, and stay out of my way when not.
> because waiting for the car to warm up takes a few minutes.
If only it was this. Usually the car transmission breaks, there are random engine shutdowns, and after restart the car just doesn't function anymore. And when it actually does start, it moves so slow and consumes so much fuel that I can't justify using it. That's my experience with JetBrains IDEs.
Side note: to a rounding error, all modern cars can be safely driven right away. Wait a few seconds for the sound of the engine to change, indicating that oil is now happily pumping through all the grindy bits, and then you're ready to go. I'm not saying you want to drag race your neighbor 10 seconds after starting the engine for the first time that day, but once you don't hear the tappets being tappety, it's OK to pull out of your driveway and start moving at a sane pace.
Not who you are replying to, but the new Lexus RX350h takes and absurdly long time to be ready to drive away, if you want to use the rear camera to help back out of the parking lot.
Slow car computers aside, it doesn't really make a difference in the scheme of things. Spend the time backing up now or later. Also, maybe you need to use your trunk and you'd rather have it opening into free space instead of another vehicle or a wall.
I contend it does. People tend to take way more time backing into a space than pulling into it, and hardly more time backing out of a space than pulling forward out of it.
I'm certain this isn't how they think of it, but when I see someone blocking traffic while they painfully back into a spot, I imagine them imagining themselves having to fly out of there without a moment to spare, like they plan on having a drastic emergency before they leave. And if that person isn't driving a police or fire department car or the like, I roll my eyes at the delusion of grandeur.
Surely a big part of the reason is steering leverage relative to the kerb.
You are able to one-shot reverse parallel park into a much narrower gap without hitting the bumpers of the cars around you or getting onto the pavement.
In my cars, generally, yes. The Lexus in question is my MIL's car, and she prefers it parked at home nose-in. We were also running some errands that required access to the rear (groceries, returning a printer/fax machine).
I asked a former truck driver once and his answer was that it's easier to see what's in front of you than behind you. I wondered why people in our neighborhood backed into their driveways at first, then I realized this was indeed true. If I turn into the street and back into my driveway, somebody probably hasn't jumped behind my car. If I get in my car and back out of my driveway, somebody walking/biking along may not notice my car backing out of the driveway, and my old potato backup camera isn't always the best at illuminating people behind my car at night in bad weather.
I wonder this too. It’s much harder to back into a cramped parking space than backing out into an open space. So they do it very slowly. Watching people do this is frustrating.
They would rather back into a parking spot surrounded by stationary obstacles than back into a parking lot or road which may contain pedestrians or other drivers.
I'm not saying _I_ back into spaces. I generally drive into spots and reverse out of them. However, I admit that what I do is a tradeoff where I take on risk in order to have a mechanically easier time entering and exiting the space.
That's true, but what GP is saying is that when you're pulling out, you are traversing the part of the space overwhelmingly more likely to contain passing pedestrians and vehicles with full visibility.
And then some parking spots require parallel parking which is best done via backing up anyway.
> It’s much harder to back into a cramped parking space than backing out into an open space.
With cramped parking spaces, your real options are (a) backing into it or (b) driving forward into it. When you need to have a 90 degree turn, option (a) gives you more control over the eventual position of your car, and is frequently the only option.
I didn't time it but I'd put it at 30 seconds. It sits there for a while with the infotainment screen black, then it does this animated splash screen, then it loads the infotainment/cameras.
If a text editor is a car, an IDE is an airplane. You can get to more places with it, but you need a lot of space and time to even start moving and then it consumes a ridiculous amount of fuel.
That actually makes it a great analogy. An IDE allows you to make common edits like renaming a variable, just as an airplane gets you to any big city. But when you need to make an uncommon edit, it’s better to reach for Vim – just like you need a car to get to some random place in the middle of woods.
This comment is so absurd I'm struggling to reply.
A car takes you to an "uncommon place in the woods?"
Taking a plane is a "common edit?"
For the majority of people a car would be the "common" usage and a plane would be the "uncommon" usage. Unless you're a billionaire taking your private jet between runways to then hop on a helicopter for the rest of your trip.
Exhausting the CPU and memory? I'm genuinely curious how he gets such a different experience to me.
Startup is definitely slower than vim though, but it's something that happens only once for me, then it stays open all day (unlike vim which I close and open repeatedly)
I don't use Zed, but do use Neovim but people make similar arguments.
If I have access to a LSP and DAP, also do most of my refactoring through c tags and vim grep (or grug-far if I want to be fancy). What IDE specific features am I missing out on that can't be replicated?
Being earnest here because I always screenshare with co-workers doing a variety of things and there is nothing I ever see that is impressive or makes me want to switch.
- Debugger (remote, local , with access to state, stack and ability to modify the state while stepping through), though I assume this is possible with neovm?
- built-in profiler
- can run individual tests seamlessly
- understands bytecode enhancers like Lombok
- Find Usage, find symbol, language specific navigation, showing class hierarchies, going up/down the hierarchies etc (maybe in conjunction with LSP, other editors can do a decent job?)
This is the main one for me. If I am working on a large project with decent unit test coverage, the feedback loop in IntelliJ or Visual Studio is just much quicker than the alternatives because you can run and debug the specific tests you need.
If you really wanted to you could add some trigger on save for a file that would re-run tests for said file. Maybe a plugin or key bind could run a specific test which you choose in buffer.
Characterizing Zed as a text editor is disingenuous.
Zed has documentation, go-to definition/usage, local/remote debugger, can run/debug individual tests, has git and markdown. Essentially all the core IDE functionality is there. All of these work as well or better for Rust in Zed than IntelliJ.
ByteCode decompilation is a very Java-specific thing and I've not used Zed for Java yet. I suspect that they'll get around to it eventually if they don't already have it.
I've never used database plugins in any IDE I've ever used so I can't compare/contrast between Zed and JetBrains products. However, as soon as I see an IDE gain a database plugin, I know it's the beginning of the end for that IDE. After the database plugin is the CSS minimizer, the JavaScript Bundler, I guess the AI plugin is the new hip thing. For the twilight years of my IntelliJ/CLipn usage, the first thing I'd do upon installation would be to go remove all the damn plugins.
I am not sure if you are replying to me or someone else. I never said I'm characterizing Zed as a text editor. Never used it, and have no opinion on it. My listing above was on why I am sticking with Jetbrains. Also did not say anything about AI.
IDEs/Editors ultimately are a very personal choice assuming they have sufficient features for a given language ecosystem.
My problems are mostly with the language servers. I've always found them to be slower, consume more resources, and provide worse results compared to the equivalent JetBrains IDE. I've tried Python, Rust, and Go within the last few months and found this is still the case. Go is the worst of them, on larger repos gopls will easily consume 3-4x more memory than GoLand with far worse responsiveness on completions.
Jetbrains IDE, sure, they take their sweet time indexing your project, but once per start.
The Java LSP is a egregious "thing" that takes 10 to 30s to read your whole project for the n-th time while eating 40GiB of RAM in the process. On a loop, EVERY time you view a new file.
You shouldn't be seeing indexing once per start. The indexes are stored to disk. You might see the IDE scan files to figure out if anything changed whilst the IDE was stopped.
We're not missing anything, or at least not anything I actually miss. I had a previous supervisor who chided me for "not using an IDE" because I was using Emacs -- Emacs! -- and insisted I should use something more featureful.
First, that doesn't exist, and the notion's laughable.
Second, I have every feature I actually want to use in Emacs (and Zed and even *vim), and have no reason to believe that any random bullet point someone might come up with 1) doesn't exist in those editors, or 2) that I'd use it anyway.
> I imagine that just way more work was poured into VS/Jetbrains debuggers
I'm fascinated at how vastly different our perspectives are. From my POV, I'd be shocked if VS/Jetbrains had a fraction of the work poured into them that Emacs or Vim have.
VS and JetBrains IDEs have very good sane defaults. They're usable out of the box. In VS I load a .sln file, or a project containing CMakeLists.txt, press F5, and I am debugging with a full-fledged data structure visualisation, CPU and heap profiling, and I can even add in time-travel debugging with a couple of clicks.
I have to manually set all of this up in Vim or Emacs, and frankly the debugging experience in GDB or LLDB is worse than it really ought to be. People actually need to use good tools to understand how nice things can be.
Zed is also insanely capable for the short span its been around, and very responsive. I love JetBrains and used them for over a decade now, but I think I will likely cancel next year since I find myself only using Zed these days.
Is it? For the three languages I tried to use it for it was terrible.
It was like it only had the basic language support plugin I wrote for myself at uni: basic syntax and current file/directory only source files loaded into context.
So any referenced projects, tooling, even packages in one language, and you have false positive errors everywhere.
I am not particularly bothered by the speed but the AI suggestion clutter is quickly becoming an issue for me :( I type fragments of a line and it will suggest the next 5-6 lines. They may not be outright wrong, but they might not represent the way I like to do things. Pressing Esc. and refocusing on what I was going to type in anyway is a disruptive experience.
I should go back to this (like some of the other comments suggest) - I think there is potential in suggesting multiple lines, and I would have really loved it to work, but it is clear that their ux testing was poor.
In JetBrains I limit AI suggestions to just the rest of the line I'm currently writing, tends to work a lot better for me. I also use the older ML models.
I use VSCode more often than PyCharm nowadays (same reasons as TFA, it's just too heavy), but unless something has changed in the last couple of months, you can disable the AI completions
For me, it's outright wrong half the time. But subtly wrong, the worst kind of wrong. At least in the month I kept it on for Rustrover while I was trying it out.
I just turned it off immediately in Rider in my professional work.. There's no specific AI policy for my client, but I'd rather not risk anything for now; I'll take full responsibility for any code I make on the dime.
Yeah, this resonates. I have a high end machine (9950x, 64 GB RAM, and a 5090) and Webstorm is PAINFULLY slow.
I don't use any crazy plugins and I hit one or more of these issues almost every day:
- Code analysis during git commit taking minutes
- 10-15 seconds for the as-you-type suggestion box to pop up, I often end up just typing the full variable name myself
- Typescript taking 10-30 seconds to refresh errors, even with the experimental tsgo rewrite
- Freezing and displaying the "dump threads" message, weirdly also lagging out my Spotify
- Easily consuming 10+ GB of memory (how?)
My daily ritual is restarting Webstorm from how much memory it leaked overnight.
Many of us still use Jetbrains products because we're willing to put up with a little lag for the multitude of really useful features you get, but they need to attack performance seriously or they're going to risk losing folks.
How old is "old hardware"? I've had no issues running CLion on a 2020 M1 Macbook Air and a i5-10400 (Linux). These projects are only in the hundreds of thousands of lines of code though.
> The install is gigantic on disk, leading me to avoid it on my older machines where space is limited.
I found that by default toolbox likes to keep old versions of the IDEs available for rollback. I disabled that and reclaimed tens of GB across all the products I use.
I run Dataspell and Pycharm on Intel Macs, and have been trying to decide whether to stick with JB products for writing Go or switch to VScode.
I don't find it terrible, but startups are slow and Dataspell often seems to get stuck in an very long slow loop of updating skeletons in my python package library. Probably not coincidentally, the package manager is apt to be the aprt of the IDEA that gets really sluggish and unresponsive, but I've also noticed problems with code completion/documentation popups. I don't have a vast number of packages installed, and my projects are pretty small, rarely more than 1000 lines of code. My code is also pretty clean and tidy because I'm not doing anything too complex.
> Toolbox
yes I've noticed this too. I don't like it much, eg I had an old instance of dataspell that I uninstalled manually a couple of years ago but the ghost of it still shows up in Toolbox and there's no way to get rid of it. I sometimes feel like JB focuses too much on adding features but not enough on polishing them.
> Granted, I tend to run older hardware, but it seems that most other programs on my machine run fast and happy
I'd really like some context here. Because for some people this is like "My M4 is out of date now the M4 ultra is out" and for others it's "I think computers really took a step back when when we started to talk about Gigahertz and Gigabytes, a 386 is all I need".
Personally, I found JetBrains IDEs to be perfectly usable on a dual core third gen i5 laptop with 16GB of RAM. Thinkpad T530 from ~2013
It is of course sluggish to index large projects, but it's equally slow on my brand new Ryzen system. Otherwise it's completely fine. It was my main daily driver dev machine until 2024.
I wish that software is constantly updated and tuned for the past, not the future. I find quite ridiculous that we only keep pouring ram, disk, processor and yet tools lag behind. How is that possible?
JetBrains to my understanding like a traditional IDE similar to Visual Studio (classic) that comes with a lot of stuff in the box that lighter weight text editor inspired development environments don’t have.
It is completely expected that it’s slower.
I remember my first job I had to request a new workstation just to tolerate using Visual Studio. (Actually, all I asked for was an SSD, but my manager over-delivered and went ahead with a whole new workstation)
CLion in particular is abysmal, yeah. so is RustRover. `rustacean.vim` gave me much better Rust UX than RustRover. although, for Android and serious Kotlin work, IntelliJ IDEA is the IDE and you can do nothing about it. yes, there is Kotlin LSP made by JetBrains themselves, but there are so many little things that are done faster in IDEA than Neovim unless you configure the hell out of it. Docker integration is one of hundreds of examples. meanwhile, assuming that you have set up your CMake properly, `clangd` just works and CLion has nothing to offer on top for anything but Unreal Engine. (didn't try Unreal support, so can't vouch for quality.)
same story with Rider and .NET: ReSharper, tied to Visual Studio, VS C*de, or Rider is just so much better than Roslyn-based analysis. and although you totally can put up some contraptions to prevent roslyn-ls from `ENOSPC`'ing your drive with leaked file watches in Neovim and benefit from even higher speeds, Rider is just faster than Visual Studio and that's enough.
Thank you for this post!
1) I've been considering Zed for a long time, but it hasn't worked well in my KVM. Due to the poor(?) ability to pass GPU through on my Ubuntu 24.04 machine. I have read that 26.04 may have fixed this so I'll try it again!
2) I am in the same boat with slowness. I've been using PHPStorm for over 10 years and it has always been "slow", but the newest pain point is that I will have claude in a terminal update a file. If the file is open in PHPstorm's viewing pain, it might take 10+ seconds to update the contents: I now always "update from disk" if I want to copy the contents outside of my KVM. It's just absolutely terrible workflow.
3. I have also found all of their AI efforts to not only be poorly executed, but executed in poor taste: it's just IN THE WAY rather than being helpful.
4. I mostly don't appreciate most of their features, generally. My flow is pretty simple. I no longer use most of the features. I just don't need the 8000lb elephant any more.
The speed thing is crucial for me. I'm bouncing between various projects regularly and use different editor windows for each project. I have a shell function called `zedme` that takes an optional argument, and opens the root directory of the current Git repo I'm in and also the additional file I named.
Open the whole project I'm in:
$ zedme
Open a specific file within the context of this project:
$ zedme foo.rs
In regular operation, in sizable projects, those commands each take about 1 second to open a whole project with tree navigation and all that, plus the specified file complete with syntax highlighting and language server etc.
One moment, I'm happily working away in a terminal. One second later, I'm looking at a full-featured editor with all the tooling I want.
That's the performance bar, the expectation. Slower than that and I have to adapt my workflow to the editor, not vice versa, and I've never used an editor so great that I'm willing to tolerate that.
> I cannot for the life of me understand why it keeps re-indexing my codebase in certain circumstances. Perhaps this is some on-again off-again bug, but it comes back to bite me constantly.
This is the thing that drives me insane. The most annoying part is that they haven't built a proper cross-idea way to diagnose this. How hard is it to just have a UI, or even some text log, that says "I'm reindexing because X, Y, Z have changed" or something?
I wasn't going to pipe up because I wasn't sure that a Hackernews thread is a good substitute for an issue tracker... but it's related to new AI-driven workflows so I hope it chins the bar.
Now that I work on 3-8 concurrent projects, I want to have them most of them open so I can interact, sense-check, be engaged in the work. When I tear down one worktree, ALL projects open in RubyMine concurrently re-index. It kills my M3 Max and I have to force quit. Then when I restart RubyMine it does the same so I have to race to press the tiny pause button on just enough of the projects for it to not die. There's no way to tweak the re-indexing settings or determine when it will kick off. WHY it kicks off - i don't know.
This is the single thing that's led me to Zed/VSCode, or to not open more than 2 at a time.
I used JetBrains IDEs for years, and dropped it years ago because of this. It was maddening then and crazy to hear that after all this time it’s still a problem.
> I cannot understand why Jetbrains keep the VM settings as constrained as they do. It's a big difference.
A lot of the things JetBrains does are questionable, particularly the way they write UI applications. One would expect from a company that spawned a widely used JVM language and a JVM IDE that they would know how to write responsive Java UIs, but apparently, they don't. They are doing some really weird stuff like mixing up Skia with Swing, it’s just a big mess. The worst part is that most people will end up thinking Java is the issue. Ironically, Microsoft has done the same to Visual Studio which is incredibly sluggish these days.
Idk what has changed, but I used PyCharm like 10 years ago and it was fine. Way faster than other IDEs in fact. I only stopped cause I switched to vim.
Just here to say that I've switched to lazyvim and have never looked back. There's something special about being able to combine tmux with resurrect and having every single project I am working on at the same time, being able to access it from any other machine via ssh and all with really low resource usage and lag. I mean I was programming yesterday with 6mbps and over 200ms of latency with hardware(typing follows host, not client) cursor over ssh, still felt like local meanwhile jetbrains couldn't keep up running in a vm over their remote gateway.
Thanks for the recommendation! I already use tmux and nvim but sort of half-heartedly, using VS Code for certain things. Lazyvim and resurrect look like just what I need to take the next step.
> There's something special about being able to combine tmux with resurrect and having every single project I am working on at the same time
Hey I can do that with VS Code! As long as I have 256 GB of RAM, that is.
I have 192gb and it still wasn't enough with I had different IDE's open all 4-5 projects each since they abandoned the "single IDE" approach awhile back. Under 32gigs of heap it performs horrible on bigger projects. Monorepos are a disaster.
When I started my professional work, Visual Studio was the recommended editor where I was, it was terrible, the Laptops we had were incredibly shit. My phone scored better on benchmarks than it, as such Visual Studio was not a good experience, I convinced my boss to let us try Rider, it was incredible, I no longer had to sit for 10s of minutes for a project to load, it was relatively snappy. My next job I started using Goland and was quite happy with it, at this point we had more high-power macs, but still great editor. I then moved on to Neovim, and then Helix in search of better ergonomics. I now have gone full circle and pretty much develop on a laptop of the same caliper as when i started working, however, because of a more lightweight editor helix, it doesn't feel like a slog, I wished I'd gotten it recommended back then, or been curious enough to give it a try, I'd saved myself many coffee breaks, and pain.
So if anyone is out there sitting in a similar position, give it a shot, you can get a better editor experience, whether you build it yourself with emacs, neovim, or use a more curated approach like helix, or zed for that matter. I mix and match Helix now with Claude Code, and it works really well. I don't want a single AI feature in my editor, only navigation, and auto complete. I'll have my AI on the side thank you ;)
I love PyCharm, but on my work laptop, it feels slow, and randomly likes to suddenly peg a CPU core to 100% for no apparent reason. It's not indexing as far as I can tell, it's just...stuck in some loop or something. My laptop fan goes wild. I've tried letting it sit for hours for it to figure out whatever the hell it's trying to do, but nothing.
The thing is, I don't know what I'd use otherwise. I demand an actual IDE, not a text editor that allows me to install a ton of plugins to make it into a half-baked IDE (ie, vim).
Maybe I should actually give VSCode a strong try. I've only used it as a code viewer for anything that's not Python.
I don't use CLion, but I use Rider a lot. And at some point I had to modify their JVM settings and give it more RAM. It got much snappier. I think when there's not enough RAM for JVM it runs GC too much and it gets slow. I also don't really load the IDE all the time. It just always there, just sits open. I use it daily. No need to restart it. I admit it feels slower than some other apps, but not so slow really. I have a pretty dated Macbook Pro M1 and I would never characterize its performance as abysmal. "Could be faster" yes, but not abysmal by any measure.
Still a bit weird that this text editor has an immense amount of venture capital invested in it, but yeah, I'll probably end up giving Zed another go. Still, they've made some odd decisions in the past. It took a lot of community pushback just to get them to add that 'disable_ai' flag (mandatory feature for me).
I've been using JetBrains for 6 years, have tried and failed to switch off, but this article expresses my similar frustrations.
I've also been having massive problems with their sync- like between IDEs or even upgrading versions, I have to reconfigure all my plugins and settings bimonthly. And their AI assistant is so obnoxious- it is a chore to turn off and it randomly turns itself back on for me, ignoring the fact it kinda sucks.
The speed and reindexing issues are also a big problem. I had to hack my way around Tauri when I was using it a year or so back (not sure if this is still an issue). The tauri_ctx! macro apparently generated a lot of code, and slowed RustRover down to a crawl, where syntax highlighting couldn't keep up- it was unusable. I ended up having to move it to it's own crate.
The Android Studio by Jetbrains is an official IDE for Android. If you try simple refactoring, rename/move a class it crashes.
It’s a bug that was there from the beginning. Despite issues opened with hundred comments, it was not fixed for decade.
Couple of years ago the issue was closed “won’t fix”, as they handed Android Studio development and support to Google, and it’s still not fixed.
I also cut off JetBrains recently after a long relationship with their tools. I agree with the points made by the author. The tools are clunky resource hogs for seemingly no reason. I was really excited when JetBrains announced Fleet and promised a lightweight UI with the old analysis engines as lighter background processes. It seemed like it would solve a lot of the problems I had with their IDEs. That never materialized though. They say that Fleet integrated into Air, but Air is not an IDE. So now we're just left with the diminishing value of their traditional IDE offering and some floundering attempts to get into the AI market. What a shame.
I'm also done with JetBrains—just tried them again (RustRover) after a hiatus. It felt much slower than I remember, even after changing away from the default theme as others have suggested.
Having just made the switch to Kubuntu, I'm going to try Kate as my primary editor for a while. It's missing features, but it sure is snappy.
When the author says 'I tend to run older hardware', how old do they mean? I'm typing this message right now on my Thinkpad x220 from 2011, which is unfortunately too old to run Zed because its internal Intel HD graphics card doesn't support Vulkan. I'd be an everyday user if not for this.
Totally valid reasons, I haven't had the same experience but I mostly do work on Java or React & Rails in IDEA can't speak to CLion or RustRover etc.
Really my biggest thing for jetbrains is the cost, of course my company pays for a license on my main machine but I've been paying for a personal license as well and have been thinking of making the switch to Zed/NeoVim/VSCode etc. for a while just to save a few bucks every month.
Similar situation here. I primarily bounce between TypeScript, Python, and occasional Java -- all very well supported by JetBrains IDEs.
I occasionally try switching editors, most recently to vscode, but between the near flawless vim emulation, refactor functionality, and multi-language support I always come crawling back to JetBrains, despite the memory bloat and occasional buggy release.
Maybe that'll change someday, and I honestly hope something better comes along, but for now it just works better for my workflows and is worth the cost of admission.
Since many people are asking "how old", Here the numbers on my laptop:
- OS : windows
- CPU : i7-1365U
- GPU: no idea, probably Intel or a low end Nvidia
- RAM: 32 Gb
The time to load (TtL) is defined as the time between I start the program and the IDE has completely loaded (nothing load or spin or whatever). For each test I open the IDE once first in order for potential updates and changes in configuration to apply, then I close.
Pycharm, clean install - no plugins, TtL to empty dashboard: 60s. Ttl to a small python project: 60s
VScode, old install with several plugins : TtL to empty dashboard: 8s. TtL to a small python project: 20s
Zed, clean install - no plugin: TtL to empty page: 2s. TtL to a small python project: 4.4s
I hope someone at jetbrains with enough power read what we are saying in this thread.... changes for the sake of changes are bad... when they did the change to the "new UI" I kind of stomach it.. because the option to go to the other one was there... but I don't know... how much benefit did everyone derive from it?
But when the AI crazyness started it was f downhill... Jetbrains need to do a one thing... expose a connector so the ai can connect to the thing and do what it needs to do... so the IDE amplifies the model... go to definition... give me back all the errors... without having to play with bash, make the thing go fast... and please don't put the stuff we want to do behind a gated thing that only you can give us and charge us for...
I stopped paying and stayed in 2024.2, every once in a while I see if there is anything meaningful worth it there... nop
>expose a connector so the ai can connect to the thing and do what it needs to do...
They have done this now, they've implemented ACP so you can use any agent that supports that from any IntelliJ editor. They (optionally) provide an MCP server which the agents can also use.
Have you found a good replacement for that in other editors?
I hate it when I try to refactor or rename something in VSCode, which can be done deterministically, but it tries to use AI for it, which can mess things up.
It's not that easy. LSP does not have a standard way to expose things not specified. So, at best you need an LSP server exposing more + the LSP client to also understand it [2].
The best that comes to mind is nvim-jdtls [0].
Maybe at some point the LSP spec could be extended with more refactoring, or maybe there could be a open rewrite LSP server [1].
I wouldn't expect intellij to release a LSP server with all the refactoring tools, though.
I really like datagrip when working with SQL. It works on most common databases, and allows for inline query results, giving a workflow comparable to jupyter notebooks. All Jetbrains IDEs using the same keybindings for e.g. multi line edit is another big plus, I have to learn only 1 IDE.
But there are clouds on the horizon. Every time I install the big data tools plugin, instability follows swiftly, untill I uninstall it again. I've noticed some cosmetic changes disturbing my workflow for no good reason.
Last update broke datagrip's AI completely, the plugin simply won't download and datagrip is not in the list of supported IDEs anymore. I lived with it for 2 days, but reported an issue anyway. Either I have a specific breakage or use a very specific setup, because I found no duplicate reports. Which, for such a major feature breaking, makes me feel like I live in an abandoned city.
I will still pay for next year's licence, it is still best in class for my needs. But if things stay like this for long, I'll have to migrate
Lol, I hear developers everywhere telling me Jetbrains products are getting worse with every release.
But I wonder why do they tell me and not scream at jetbrains, it's not like I can fix that as sysadmin. Stop writing blogs and telling others, start rioting in their forums!
We did, very loudly. They deleted the threads. They deleted comments on their blog. Then the new CEO published a press release with a ton of outright blatant lies, and they deleted the comments calling it out.
If program has time to display startup banner - it is too slow. I was amazed how quickly Zed starts and it already has last project open and ready. Compared to JetBrains IDE, in some recent version they even added a toast informing that IDE is not responding. That tells much about application. And when whole UI keeps loading separate blocks like a website - absolutely annoying. Sometimes I don't even know if UI is actually ready to work, or clicking git branch selector will not yield any results, because something somewhere is still loading. Several GB size on disk with mostly unused plugins is just taking up space and makes loading IDE slower. They lost me as a customer when they dropped community edition of PyCharm. I was paying for PhpStorm for several years, until then, and dabbling with Python on the side. Having mandatory log in for free version is absurd.
I've always found JetBrain products interesting . I started my dev career using Borland C++ builder ans VB5. I went through most IDEs, including the infamous NetBeans and Eclipse (which made their own "non-swing" ui for "speed". Building a UI application in Java just never made sense to me. Its just not the technology gor that.
On the dev side, I started with IDEs and debuggers and whatnot, but later in my career they didn't give me enough value, and the time needed to configure them (I remember trying to setup RubyMine debugger.. yuck!).
Nowadays I mostly do vim VSCode and recently Cursor/Antigravity for the AI.
But my theory is that IDEs are going to disappear due to AI based development. Paradigms will be different.
Every once in a while, I have to figure out an IntelliJ indexing issue. I've got a personal Claude sub and access to Claude for work, so will not be using the JetBrains AI sub. If the indexing gets worse, or paying more for their AI becomes mandatory, I'll be done and back to Emacs, which is what I've been using for Claude anyway. Not there yet tho.
> Granted, I tend to run older hardware, but it seems that most other programs on my machine run fast and happy
Curious what hardware you’re on. I’m in the same camp with JetBrains products, performance has always been my biggest complaint. Apple M chips made a huge difference though. It’s still not my preference, but at least it’s a lot more usable now. Most of my colleagues run multiple instances daily without issues.
The main point of IDE is not code completion but lots of static and dynamic analysis to keep you from writing bad, slow, insecure, what have you, code.
Most of that stuff is proprietary and cannot be plugged into terminal.
The only attempt I’ve seen was actually by Jetbrains with Resharper beta for vscode
That's mostly delegated out to language servers now. There's no need for Zed and Emacs and Vim and so on to each individually have to re-implement renaming a Rust function.
I also highly doubt that any IDE, whatever that is, is better at analyzing Rust code than rust-analyzer is. Not every language will have a language server that excellent, but I hope that'll improve for those users.
Eh, haven't needed it. Especially now that there are AI coding agents, but even before that. If I really wanted to run some static analysis in IntelliJ, always had the option to do it separately from my real editor.
For me the nail in the coffin will come in 2027Q1: with CodeWithMe going away. Until then, the quality of editing code remotely together with the mostly clean refactoring and navigation options is a deal breaker.
If anyone has something roadmapped to replace CodeWithMe, it's worth bucks.
The git CLI in notoriously bad. Nobody would need tools like https://frostming.github.io/legit/ if the git CLI would be any good. Also we would not need websites like https://ohshitgit.com/ Look at the commands: Even Claude Opus 4.7 struggles with that.
I’ll occasionally have PHPStorm use up all available memory, but it tends to go away after a restart of the app. And this is something that happens maybe a few times a year?
It's very hard to compete with the massively-token-subsidized big players when our entire team is spending nearly 20x the claude code subscription cost in API token usage - it's impossible for anyone else to do it without eating huge losses.
Junie - their coding agent - was also a miss. I've had Rider for almost 10 years currently - but considering dropping it.
Tradcoding is basically dead, and a lightweight text editor with tree-sitter has come a long way - and it's good enough to read/micro edit with anyway.
I feel bad for them as it's been such a stable product for decades of excellent development, but the world moves on.
For whatever reason zed takes forever to paste on my m1max MBP. Im talking at least 1.5s for a paste a few characters from clipboard or to duplicate a line.
That is "duplicate line down" -- I want "duplicate line up" which copies the current line to the line above the cursor. My open request been sitting in jetbrains "ignore it" for many many years.
I don’t really get the difference but why don’t you use macros for that?
You can achieve anything with macros and you can give shortcuts to a named macros.
Macros are in the Edit > Macros menu. Add a shortcut to a macro in Settings , Keymap > search Macros, right click on Play Saved Macro and Add Keyboard Shortcut.
Unfortunately this is all true. I have also been using Clion to program C++ on Linux for almost a decade and the past 5 years the product has been in a free fall.
- every new release breaks something
- the syntax highlight and auto completion engine has glaring bugs when using multiple file splits. Bugs are open for a decade already.
- performance is complete dog shit. Typing a characters spins up several cores at 100%.
- QA plays the "test the bug on the latest and report back or it doesn't exist" game.
Overall they seem to be more interested in shuffling the UI around and adding useless AI features nobody asked for while the core product is eroding fast. It really looks like they don't have tbe engineering capacity/talent to keep the product in shape and whatever capacity they have is misspent on wrong stuff.
We're building a product [1] to compete with DataGrip, a JetBrains product.
Many people told us we were crazy to compete with such a mature product as DataGrip before we got started.
It has been fascinating to speak to people who use database apps and to learn about their experiences.
Now, we have many, many customers telling us that they have cancelled their DataGrip/JetBrains sub and have switched to using our product, mainly due to speed but also cost.
I'd love to give this a try, I work at a privacy sensitive company, can I ask in advance is it possible to opt out of:
> We automatically collect certain information when you use DB Pro:
> Device information (IP address, browser type, operating system)
> Usage patterns and interaction with our services
> Log files and analytics data
> Cookies and similar tracking technologies
I thought the constant reindexing was due to Shared Indexing, which seems now relegated to a plugin and off by default? Pretty sure that was the cause of my issues in ~2024/2025
I ran jetbrains ides for about six years, and recently switched back to Sublime but with LSPs. Nowadays with LLMs I just want to open an editor quickly to make changes, or navigate the code. Even the typescript LSP is faster to start than loading the IDE. And ripgrep is much faster than the fancy indexed search in the IDE. Not to mention, the search box would just half the time not work in the IDE or flat out lie? Also on linux the "go anywhere" modal would sometimes just be a black window or be positioned wrong.
They are doubling down on the state of things now by running "safe and stable" advertising, which doesn't make me feel like they're actually going to improve anything. I probably won't be renewing, either.
IntelliJ is vastly superior to any other java IDE but their AI agent implementation sucks pretty hard. It's slower, crashes, there is enormous amount of bugs. Meanwhile VSCode have absolutely seamless implementation of Codex.
I do not understand what is their play but it seems to me like they missed last two years of very rapid and forming progress.
of course an editor like Zed is faster than CLion but it makes little sense to compare the two. People use full blown IDEs like Jetbrains or Visual Studio for their heavier features like debugging and profiling, not because they feel snappy. When I write C++ my workflow has always been to use vim for editing and use VS for debugging.
I agree, Clion is superior in terms of features, but it loses really badly in terms of performance. I've recently switched off after being loyal to jetbrains for a long time. But this was mostly because AI negated the use of IDEs.
> But there is one teeny tiny problem: the tool is so fricken slow.
Reminds me about that time i was working at one of the very large cloud providers. I had to edit a script in a source code repository and somehow the direction was something like "download the correct jetbrains ide, connect it to the internal license server, install the 20 plugins to make it work with the internal source code service, the internal code review service, the internal build service, the internal this and the internal that".
Spent like two days installing half of the shit and losing myself among the infinity of wiki pages explaining how to configure this hyper-dimensional tetris.
Then i gave up and just opened good old gnu emacs on my cloud desktop. Thank god there was an internal emacs user group that had written a few major and minor modes to work with the internal tooling.
I was done setting everything up in like one hour.
I unironically spent two years and a half working in gnu emacs running in a screen session, and it was much more productive than whatever jetbrains stuff they were recommending.
if anyone ever reads about this comment, please start to think about how to fuzz your software in a fast way. You don't need to correct or patch every bug, you just need to find where the algorithm A, B, C doesn't perform well, or where you have an allocation of 2 MBs for a linked list that should have been half of it.
I'm not a daily user of jetbrains product, but please. If there's any engineering/developers, start to use afl/cargo fuzz or whatever your fuzzer is, and spot bottlenecks, issues. I started to write software because I was looking at the quality of the very first softwares that were being fuzzed and it opened me some doors.
Lots of respect for what JetBrains has built, but I switched from PyCharm to Zed full-time about 6 months ago because while feature wise PyCharm was very good, I could not deal with the interminable "indexing". Fine if you have one project that you're working with all day long but I open a dozen different ones throughout the day and there was such a big project switching cost each time.
I've been very happy with Zed, and that was before it had as many features as it does now.
I have recently thinking about jumping ship, too, but for usability reasons. The Claude Code terminal is quite a desaster. Soft line breaks are copied to clipboard as hard line breaks (not great for console commands), it constantly loses focus and it has not good focus indicator, which is so super annoying that this alone made me already switch to VS Code for smaller projects. Also, keyboard navigation sucks (it randomly seems to switch between ctrl and shift enter for line breaks), no ctrl+a (very annoying if you want to delete a longer text). It does not seem to get much love from Jet rains, despite being as important as the editor itself. Using Claude in Webstorm feels like using a terminal in the 80s, and while others may find this cool I am not enjoying that.
Biggest killer of JetBrains IDEs has been simple: the “Switcher” now orders navigation destinations dynamically, whereas they used to be static. Destination keymap is not customizable. Ruins all of my muscle memory and makes me hate the IDE now. Someone at JetBrains please read this and make the Switcher destinations something I can customize in the keymap
Me too, however this is another case of exchanging IDE for text editor without understanding what is being lost, or never having used the IDE to its full potential in first place, thus not knowing what is being left behind.
I was in a meeting with a colleague about a PR for some python code. One of the things I noticed was that he had an unused module that contained an import of a non-existent class from another module. I know he uses Pycharm, so I mentioned to him that this kind of thing should be hard to miss, because the linter in Pycharm should have marked it, and the folder it's in, as red.
He tells me, and I quote, "Oh, all the files are red."
This was the third wtf in that same meeting, so I think I did ok waiting to lose my cool until then.
Second wtf you may ask? In the goal of changing the storage of our data, he implemented 3 of ~10 behaviors of the existing library, and silently ignore all calls to the remaining 7. Guess which 3 were never used in the existing library!? :D
20 years "experience". Total incompetence. I should correct that: 17 years. After he was hired, during our first lunch together, he admitted he did nothing the last 3 of his previous employment, getting stuck in some org void where he just kept quiet and sat at his desk every day.
Cowabunga. I do totally believe you, though. I was the guy doing fizzbuzz screens at a prior job. Before that, I would not have believed the failure rate for that step of the process. "The person has a job as a senior software engineer? Of course they'll ace fizzbuzz! It's insulting to even suggest otherwise!" And yet. I bet at least a third of the candidates simply could not pass that to save their lives. I went out of my way to be the friendly, relaxed, conversational interviewer, too. I never wanted to turn away a good candidate because I intimidated them or made them feel uncomfortable. And with all that, it still didn't work out.
A concrete example: one person could not get it through their head that they could write a function to return the correct value, then unit test that function with arbitrary known values. My question: "how do you know if it gets the right answer for 1,000,000,000,005?" What I wanted:
There was a binary search problem that I gave in my interviews, in the context of test and measurement. So, instead of reading a value of the monotonic curve at some index in an array, you would have to set a power supply to some voltage (independent) then read the resulting value from a volt meter (dependent). So, exact same concept, different way to "index" and retrieve the value.
To help my explanation, I had a plot to show an example monotonic y=x^2 as a blue line and an example target value as a horizontal dotted red line.
One guy I had said something like, "You can start at the left of the image, then go down looking for a blue pixel. If the blue pixel is at the red line, you have found your value".
So, he wanted to search the image of the plot rather than the data behind the plot. I tried to get him to understand that was an example, and that we had the data, and that he would have to do the measurements himself, but it just resulted in a short interview.
I eventually told all the hiring managers that I could help interview again after their screening process was fixed, at which point I learned that they just removed software from the screening process to save time. This was a ~50% software position.
> or never having used the IDE to its full potential in first place
As more and more people delegate stupid things to their agent, this type of person will become increasingly common. Products like RustRover and CLion will be a much harder sell to audiences that don't even use an LSP in their day-to-day workflow.
JetBrains is probably working on a contingency plan as we speak.
For C# development Jetbrains Rider is second to none.
The number of static analysis, refactorings, inspections, dynamic analysis, slow code paths hightlights, profiling, etc.
It just cannot be done in neovim no matter how I would like to switch.
For C++ (like the OP’s case) — maybe the situation is different. I’ve heard CLion is a meh.
—
Also Jetbrains IdeaVim plugin is the best vim emulation I’ve seen. Nothing comes close with vim plugins support, vimrc, and what have you.
I tried vim mode in Zed — it’s a joke. Immediately uninstalled and got back to vscode, at least it has some vimrc support for custom bindings.
—
Also I don’t get the start-up argument: just don’t close the app, dummy :-). YMMV of course depending on the language.
—
tldr; there is nothing to replace rider with. Because Rider is an actual IDE with tons of proprietary bells and whistles that actually matter
Then again, my dev machine is a Threadripper with tons of ram. I would probably sing a different song if I needed to work on a macbook air with 16gb of ram.
> Also Jetbrains IdeaVim plugin is the best vim emulation I’ve seen. Nothing comes close with vim plugins support, vimrc, and what have you.
Once every year or so I get annoyed with a bugged JetBalrains update or memory leaks. IdeaVim has been one of the main things pulling me back to JetBrains for a while now, although the neovim extension in vscode is also very good these days.
still king if you develop java or scala. i've tried things like metals and vim but its clunky and always go back.
if you work enterprise job then idea is the only game in town.
This fellow isnt switching IDEs, just going to a tiny editor instead. I use JB daily and I despise their quality but they do get things right eventually (eg wayland). Ignore AI and remote development, use wayvnc. Open symlinked projects in a single window. Connect agents via IDE Index MCP (not the official one). Use a sidecar editor for magical autocomplete / niche LSP extensions (mirroring the IDEs config). You cant replace an IDE with an editor…
Seems like apples to orange comparison. Text editors are always fast because they just don't provide that many features compared to an IDE. Language servers in my experience do not work that well for large projects. They feel pretty dumb. Refactoring tasks that miss some of the references is just one example. I frequently use multiple Jetbrains products like Rider, Idea, Webstorm, PyCharm, and CLion. No major complains. It takes some time to get going but after that it is mostly smooth sailing.
Yeah sadly it is getting slower and slower. I use a 3+ year old version, which is lightning fast. When I just keep the right arrow down it goes through code like a charm. The 2026 version is lagging like an overloaded ox.
The problem with new editors is that the initial friction of configuring every shit that annoys you takes too much time. I tried zed, but gimme a break, wtf has time to learn all the peculiarities.
Trying to find the stable point of agentic coding is like trying to catch a falling knife. Will you still need to look at diffs? I for one no longer make any edits, as a policy - I either tell the agent to fix it, or tweak a skill or memory or doc so it doesn't make the same mistake a second time, or configure something adversarial. But does that continue indefinitely?
Agreed within the narrow confines of web dev (which is all that I do). I used to write 500-1000? LOC per day but now I've built several full fledged (250k+ arr) sites with more features than I've ever been able to implement in such a short time: all without editing a single line of code.
My guess is they are still very useful for more difficult code! But yeah, I can't imagine ever caring about "code" any more, and therefore cannot fathom the need for a full fledged IDE.
I've been coding since 1990 myself. But I'm all in on AI.
I'm long past the need to code everything by hand; I've written editors, compilers, DOS TSR routines in assembler, disassemblers, debuggers, all sorts. I don't see any coding mountains remaining that I have a burning desire to climb. When I interact with an agent, I'm concerned about architectural nudges and fairly high-level details. And I anticipate climbing further up the abstraction stack over time.
Product management is increasingly vital; it's becoming very, very easy to implement the wrong thing, and you need to rip it out again. Editorial discipline is needed.
What I see where I am standing is that many don't code anything more, they get shown the door instead.
Because between SaaS, iPaas, Vercel, Nelify, Workato, Boomi, automatic translations, content generation, among many other tools, the team can be reduced to one third of the size it was like a decade ago, for the same content delivery.
Still, many of those tools have IDE integrations for the lucky ones that stay on board.
> It is so remarkably slow, and I cannot begin to understand these people that are telling me that it runs fast. Granted, I tend to run older hardware
Always hard to interpret these complaints when the author won't reveal what hardware they're talking about, other than that it's old.
I think Zed is a great option for someone who is both highly critical of load times and has older hardware. I would not have recommended a JetBrains IDE given this person's requirements and hardware situation.
I use JetBrains IDEs on a daily basis and it's not a problem for me, even on my M1 Apple Silicon machine which is, what, almost 6 years old now?
That said, I'm not hyper-sensitive to things like a loading screen that takes a few seconds. I open the IDE once or twice a day at most and then leave it open. I tested it just now and went from clicking to being in the IDE and editing a file in 3 seconds on a cold start (recently rebooted) on my 6 year old laptop. When I read these anecdotes I don't know if someone has a broken environment (too many plugins installed?), a really old machine, or if they're just so hyper-sensitive that a couple seconds of loading screen seen a few times a day is enough to trigger them.
> so hyper-sensitive that a couple seconds of loading screen seen a few times a day is enough to trigger them
Reportedly the xz supply chain compromise was first noticed by someone who reported his SSH connections took an extra 500 milliseconds.
https://thegeekinsights.com/how-a-hacker-saved-the-internet/
That's a point well-taken, both non-obvious and relevant, but I'm still triggered by what I can only describe as dishonesty in the phrase quoted by GP. How can one "not understand" how other developers who clearly run (as most developers do) significantly faster hardware are not having the same issue? Unless one actively doesn't want to understand.
I’ve used WebStorm for around 6 or 7 years, coming from Sublime Text. WebStorm was noticeably slower, but it did a lot of extra things.
It still does, but it’s gotten really slow lately, locking for 3–4 seconds when scrolling a larger file. I’m also on an M1 Mac with 16GB of RAM.
I think the issue (mostly) stopped when I disabled the ESLint plugin and checks, and replaced it with Biome. WebStorm still gets a bit stuck on some files, can’t figure out why since their profiling report is a binary export.
Perhaps the author is complaining about a similar, recent slowdown. I’ve no AI plugins enabled, none of the debugger/JS profile tools, and use a custom no-color theme. WebStorm never felt slower.
Plugins are often to blame, I had some recurring issues with the full IntelliJ when opening multiple instances at the same time. I switched to Webstorm without any plugins for light editing without all plugins loaded, I have around 5 instances opened at all times without any issues on an old M1 Max
IDE's format and display text. Outside of compiling, they should respond instantly on a blight-ridden potato, with resources to spare.
Text editors just format and display text. IDEs have compilers, debuggers, indexers, source control integration, analysis tooling, WSL integration, SSH integration, and whatever plugins you might have installed.
Does that definition of “text editor” still describe anything commonly used? Language servers cover a lot of that. SSH and source control are ubiquitous. I can’t think of anything in years I’ve heard of people using that would count as just a text editor.
Most popular text editors blurs the line these days. Vim can be the most straightforward text editor out there, or the most comprehensive IDE depending on how much you go into its environment. I keep Vs code bare bones and mostly use it as a text editor, but it only needs a dozen extensions to be a full fledged IDE.
It's not surprising to hear few true text editors because a text editor is more or less a solved problem. Notepad++ is 20 years old and still functions fine for those who want a pure text editor. Anyone making a modern text editor is either doing it to learn or to build up into an IDE later.
Why would a compiler take up resources when you’re not compiling anything?
To show compilation errors as you type.
Why not show the UI immediately and start the language server asynchronously in the background, like Neovim does it?
That is possible, but if swapping happens due to memory pressure it can still cause slowdowns in unrelated parts of the same or other processes.
JetBrains IDEs do this.
This is obviously massively understating what an IDE does.
Do you never use language server features? Showing git blame on files? Doing regex search and replace? Doing multi-cursor editing? Run test?
If you genuinely never do, then that's ok, you don't need an IDE.
I had my (somewhat) breakup when they started advertising their code assistant at me. My IDE is my home. You push an advertisement at me and I get mad. I killed my subscription (with 1/2 a year left) and loaded the old version and haven't looked back. I will eventually give it up completely since new python versions aren't supported for debugging but oh well.
I quit auto-updating Jetbrains products years ago and it turned out to be a great decision for me. So many updates seemed to just shuffle around UI elements that I had memorized or worsen the performance. Now I only update when there's a specific reason to, and I'm not sure there ever will be a compelling reason to upgrade beyond my current versions; there's a good chance I'll do like the OP and find a more performant editor at that point.
I don't want to sound too negative since I do like their products, but it feels like they've fallen into the same trap as a lot of SAAS companies. They have to constantly make "improvements" to justify regular subscription fees. Their products were pretty great a decade ago. Since then they've made a gazillion changes but I can probably count on one hand the number of them that I found truly useful.
Performance issues haven't been as bad for me as the TFA says, but they certainly use a lot of resources, even after I aggressively removed a bunch of default plugins and disabled features I don't use. Performance improvements would be a nice feature, but those changes rarely make the top of the SAAS priority list.
I had my breakup with them when I realized that I always install vim keybindings for every editor I use and that Neovim plus plugins gives me the typical workflow I use. It became a no-brainer to lean into the LSP ecosystem (and DAP for debugging) and have the native version of the way I like to edit files.
It also helped that Neovim tends to consume minuscule amounts of resources compared to IntelliJ. I like the product Jetbrains developed, but I don't like how resource hungry it is—running JVM software is something I try to avoid, if possible.
I had never felt betrayed by JetBrains until that moment.
I still use the Classic PyCharm UI plugin.
Not sure if I'm missing out on much today.. but initially I despised the minimalist interface for the new UI.
Still using the Classic UI plugin, the new UI has horrible contrast and changes things for the sake of change. Also why does every new UI has horrible monochromatic icons where you have to guess what they are?
Engagement, attention, predicting behavior, telemetry, and on and on.
Simplicity gets market share. Once that's built, the UI gets complex for all kinds of reasons.
Dropbox is the best example to date.
The persistent AI assistant sidebar that I have to remove every three days, the shitty "me too" VSCode clone UI, relegating the professional UI I paid for into a "maybe supported" plugin and then outright lying about the new UI being opt-in and never on by default.
JetBrains is simply not interested in power users and professionals anymore, and seem to be utterly unaware that that's their core customer base.
I canceled my all-products subscription after more than ten years and I'll be using 2024 versions until the wheels fall off.
It was also just plain strange. I don't know what they are doing to squeeze more money out of the tokens they sell, but using jetbrains' AI package always delivered significantly worse results for vs using the providers directly, and it was unbearably slow. But it appears that all of that falls on deaf ears at jetbrains, who are convinced that's the way forward, and they should become a vibe-coding system.
it's sad, but what can you do.
"but we've invested so much in our AI integration, are you sure you don't want to use it?"
(Neo)vim or Emacs. Seriously. Pick one, get conversant in its basic commands. These are longstanding, Lindy-effect editors that are free software and independent of sponsorbuxx. If your IDE is your home, then going with some company's IDE, especially the proprietary ones, is like agreeing to live in an HOA where Ring service and smart home features that spy on you are a requirement.
Well, Zed is a text editor with some plugins, while JetBrains products are full-blown IDEs, with abilities Zed will never offer.
> while JetBrains products are full-blown IDEs, with abilities Zed will never offer.
None of those matter if they just close the IDE before it indexes.
> When all of these tiny issues come together, it makes me NOT want to program. I don’t want to sit around and wait for startup times to get my ideas onto the screen. I don’t want to worry that my CPU or RAM is going to be exhausted and I am going to have to restart my machine. I want to open my editor and immediately enter a flow state. I want the tooling to assist me when useful, and stay out of my way when not.
Yes I have read that, and whatever, some people rather walk straight away, because waiting for the car to warm up takes a few minutes.
I have IDE tooling experience since Borland products for MS-DOS, and plenty of programming editors as well, between PC, Amiga, Mac and UNIX clones.
> because waiting for the car to warm up takes a few minutes.
If only it was this. Usually the car transmission breaks, there are random engine shutdowns, and after restart the car just doesn't function anymore. And when it actually does start, it moves so slow and consumes so much fuel that I can't justify using it. That's my experience with JetBrains IDEs.
Idk what car you have but mine can drive right away, just like Zed.
Side note: to a rounding error, all modern cars can be safely driven right away. Wait a few seconds for the sound of the engine to change, indicating that oil is now happily pumping through all the grindy bits, and then you're ready to go. I'm not saying you want to drag race your neighbor 10 seconds after starting the engine for the first time that day, but once you don't hear the tappets being tappety, it's OK to pull out of your driveway and start moving at a sane pace.
> indicating that oil is now happily pumping through all the grindy bits
That's not a modern car. Modern cars do not pump oil through all the grindy bits. Modern cars need to wait for the BMC to stabilize its power.
Not who you are replying to, but the new Lexus RX350h takes and absurdly long time to be ready to drive away, if you want to use the rear camera to help back out of the parking lot.
Wait, don't you reverse into a parking space and drive straight out?
Slow car computers aside, it doesn't really make a difference in the scheme of things. Spend the time backing up now or later. Also, maybe you need to use your trunk and you'd rather have it opening into free space instead of another vehicle or a wall.
I contend it does. People tend to take way more time backing into a space than pulling into it, and hardly more time backing out of a space than pulling forward out of it.
I'm certain this isn't how they think of it, but when I see someone blocking traffic while they painfully back into a spot, I imagine them imagining themselves having to fly out of there without a moment to spare, like they plan on having a drastic emergency before they leave. And if that person isn't driving a police or fire department car or the like, I roll my eyes at the delusion of grandeur.
Surely a big part of the reason is steering leverage relative to the kerb.
You are able to one-shot reverse parallel park into a much narrower gap without hitting the bumpers of the cars around you or getting onto the pavement.
In my cars, generally, yes. The Lexus in question is my MIL's car, and she prefers it parked at home nose-in. We were also running some errands that required access to the rear (groceries, returning a printer/fax machine).
I always wonder why people do this. What’s the reasoning?
I asked a former truck driver once and his answer was that it's easier to see what's in front of you than behind you. I wondered why people in our neighborhood backed into their driveways at first, then I realized this was indeed true. If I turn into the street and back into my driveway, somebody probably hasn't jumped behind my car. If I get in my car and back out of my driveway, somebody walking/biking along may not notice my car backing out of the driveway, and my old potato backup camera isn't always the best at illuminating people behind my car at night in bad weather.
When you have a tight spot, getting into it in reverse is the only way to do it safely — your front wheels can turn but your rear wheels can’t.
However I always park with the front to the exit, since I might find myself in a situation where I have to drive away very quickly.
It might be anything from a dumpster truck about to block the street to some kind of family emergency.
I have the 20 seconds now but I can't be sure I will have them in the morning.
I wonder this too. It’s much harder to back into a cramped parking space than backing out into an open space. So they do it very slowly. Watching people do this is frustrating.
They would rather back into a parking spot surrounded by stationary obstacles than back into a parking lot or road which may contain pedestrians or other drivers.
I'm not saying _I_ back into spaces. I generally drive into spots and reverse out of them. However, I admit that what I do is a tradeoff where I take on risk in order to have a mechanically easier time entering and exiting the space.
This makes no sense. In either case the car traverses the same space once forwards and once backwards.
That's true, but what GP is saying is that when you're pulling out, you are traversing the part of the space overwhelmingly more likely to contain passing pedestrians and vehicles with full visibility.
And then some parking spots require parallel parking which is best done via backing up anyway.
I don't think you understood what my comment says. The whole point is that it covers your "but".
> It’s much harder to back into a cramped parking space than backing out into an open space.
With cramped parking spaces, your real options are (a) backing into it or (b) driving forward into it. When you need to have a 90 degree turn, option (a) gives you more control over the eventual position of your car, and is frequently the only option.
Can you elaborate more on why it takes a long time to be ready to drive away in reverse? How long are you talking?
I didn't time it but I'd put it at 30 seconds. It sits there for a while with the infotainment screen black, then it does this animated splash screen, then it loads the infotainment/cameras.
Depending on the planet region, and season, you might actually have to wait before driving.
Frozen Winters, heavy snow, diesel pumps,....
If a text editor is a car, an IDE is an airplane. You can get to more places with it, but you need a lot of space and time to even start moving and then it consumes a ridiculous amount of fuel.
Horrible analogy. You can't "get to more places" with an airplane. An airplane can only go to very limited number of locations compared to a car.
That actually makes it a great analogy. An IDE allows you to make common edits like renaming a variable, just as an airplane gets you to any big city. But when you need to make an uncommon edit, it’s better to reach for Vim – just like you need a car to get to some random place in the middle of woods.
This comment is so absurd I'm struggling to reply.
A car takes you to an "uncommon place in the woods?"
Taking a plane is a "common edit?"
For the majority of people a car would be the "common" usage and a plane would be the "uncommon" usage. Unless you're a billionaire taking your private jet between runways to then hop on a helicopter for the rest of your trip.
It's a terrible analogy.
Exhausting the CPU and memory? I'm genuinely curious how he gets such a different experience to me.
Startup is definitely slower than vim though, but it's something that happens only once for me, then it stays open all day (unlike vim which I close and open repeatedly)
One can always use multiple editors for what they do besg.
Zed, helix, nvim for small files in gui or terminal.
A solid Slow start IDE for solid extended time work
I don't use Zed, but do use Neovim but people make similar arguments.
If I have access to a LSP and DAP, also do most of my refactoring through c tags and vim grep (or grug-far if I want to be fancy). What IDE specific features am I missing out on that can't be replicated?
Being earnest here because I always screenshare with co-workers doing a variety of things and there is nothing I ever see that is impressive or makes me want to switch.
I'm in the java ecosystem, so YMMV.
- Automatic spring service detection
- Debugger (remote, local , with access to state, stack and ability to modify the state while stepping through), though I assume this is possible with neovm?
- built-in profiler
- can run individual tests seamlessly
- understands bytecode enhancers like Lombok
- Find Usage, find symbol, language specific navigation, showing class hierarchies, going up/down the hierarchies etc (maybe in conjunction with LSP, other editors can do a decent job?)
- Advanced refactoring (extracting classes, interfaces, inlining functions, extracting functions/methods)
- built-in database explorer
- built-in Git support (I have struggled mightily with VSCodes git interactions - but this might just be an individual preference)
- markdown/html previews
Basically, I barely have to get out of the IDE.
> - can run individual tests seamlessly
This is the main one for me. If I am working on a large project with decent unit test coverage, the feedback loop in IntelliJ or Visual Studio is just much quicker than the alternatives because you can run and debug the specific tests you need.
Why can you not run specific tests from neovim?
If you really wanted to you could add some trigger on save for a file that would re-run tests for said file. Maybe a plugin or key bind could run a specific test which you choose in buffer.
Characterizing Zed as a text editor is disingenuous.
Zed has documentation, go-to definition/usage, local/remote debugger, can run/debug individual tests, has git and markdown. Essentially all the core IDE functionality is there. All of these work as well or better for Rust in Zed than IntelliJ.
ByteCode decompilation is a very Java-specific thing and I've not used Zed for Java yet. I suspect that they'll get around to it eventually if they don't already have it.
I've never used database plugins in any IDE I've ever used so I can't compare/contrast between Zed and JetBrains products. However, as soon as I see an IDE gain a database plugin, I know it's the beginning of the end for that IDE. After the database plugin is the CSS minimizer, the JavaScript Bundler, I guess the AI plugin is the new hip thing. For the twilight years of my IntelliJ/CLipn usage, the first thing I'd do upon installation would be to go remove all the damn plugins.
I am not sure if you are replying to me or someone else. I never said I'm characterizing Zed as a text editor. Never used it, and have no opinion on it. My listing above was on why I am sticking with Jetbrains. Also did not say anything about AI.
IDEs/Editors ultimately are a very personal choice assuming they have sufficient features for a given language ecosystem.
My problems are mostly with the language servers. I've always found them to be slower, consume more resources, and provide worse results compared to the equivalent JetBrains IDE. I've tried Python, Rust, and Go within the last few months and found this is still the case. Go is the worst of them, on larger repos gopls will easily consume 3-4x more memory than GoLand with far worse responsiveness on completions.
Jetbrains IDE, sure, they take their sweet time indexing your project, but once per start.
The Java LSP is a egregious "thing" that takes 10 to 30s to read your whole project for the n-th time while eating 40GiB of RAM in the process. On a loop, EVERY time you view a new file.
Where is my goddam lsif/scip support?
You shouldn't be seeing indexing once per start. The indexes are stored to disk. You might see the IDE scan files to figure out if anything changed whilst the IDE was stopped.
The built in debugger & profiler are the big thing above LSP equivalence for me. I know it can be done, but it's not the same.
We're not missing anything, or at least not anything I actually miss. I had a previous supervisor who chided me for "not using an IDE" because I was using Emacs -- Emacs! -- and insisted I should use something more featureful.
First, that doesn't exist, and the notion's laughable.
Second, I have every feature I actually want to use in Emacs (and Zed and even *vim), and have no reason to believe that any random bullet point someone might come up with 1) doesn't exist in those editors, or 2) that I'd use it anyway.
Debuggers are much better in JetBrains or Visual Studio than using just an editor.
Had you honestly imagined that Emacs doesn't have excellent debugging tools?
No it doesn't, unless it magically got them since XEmacs, with someone taking the effort to duplicate all features in ELisp.
Running gdb as subprocess, with breakpoints, step, run, continue, is the basic stuff.
It has. GUD is pretty good. Emacs itself has improved vastly since XEmacs was popular.
Looks pretty much the same from the docs.
I imagine that just way more work was poured into VS/Jetbrains debuggers and that they have better UX and better features.
I don’t have to offer my soul to make it work just pay money ;)
> I imagine that just way more work was poured into VS/Jetbrains debuggers
I'm fascinated at how vastly different our perspectives are. From my POV, I'd be shocked if VS/Jetbrains had a fraction of the work poured into them that Emacs or Vim have.
VS and JetBrains IDEs have very good sane defaults. They're usable out of the box. In VS I load a .sln file, or a project containing CMakeLists.txt, press F5, and I am debugging with a full-fledged data structure visualisation, CPU and heap profiling, and I can even add in time-travel debugging with a couple of clicks.
I have to manually set all of this up in Vim or Emacs, and frankly the debugging experience in GDB or LLDB is worse than it really ought to be. People actually need to use good tools to understand how nice things can be.
Try to debug a CMake file, do hot code reloading for C++, or debug release binaries with Emacs/vim.
Just three examples out of many others.
Recently been using emacs' inbuilt debugger. Honestly it is nuts, how good it is.
Now try to visually display all the threads being executed and the dependency graph who launched each thread.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/usin...
Followed by doing some code change and hot reloading it into the debugging session.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/edit...
While using binaries compiled in release build by default,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnbO140OXuI
All of it in C++.
Zed is also insanely capable for the short span its been around, and very responsive. I love JetBrains and used them for over a decade now, but I think I will likely cancel next year since I find myself only using Zed these days.
Is it? For the three languages I tried to use it for it was terrible.
It was like it only had the basic language support plugin I wrote for myself at uni: basic syntax and current file/directory only source files loaded into context.
So any referenced projects, tooling, even packages in one language, and you have false positive errors everywhere.
Sounds like you were in Restricted Mode: https://zed.dev/blog/secure-by-default#whats-changing-restri...
For a programming text editor.
I am not particularly bothered by the speed but the AI suggestion clutter is quickly becoming an issue for me :( I type fragments of a line and it will suggest the next 5-6 lines. They may not be outright wrong, but they might not represent the way I like to do things. Pressing Esc. and refocusing on what I was going to type in anyway is a disruptive experience.
I don't love that the AI suggestions seem to override completion of real/existing methods from the source code these days.
Turn it off; it makes a brilliant IDE unusable.
+1 I disabled all that and assigned a shortcut to: Call Inline Completion
I should go back to this (like some of the other comments suggest) - I think there is potential in suggesting multiple lines, and I would have really loved it to work, but it is clear that their ux testing was poor.
In JetBrains I limit AI suggestions to just the rest of the line I'm currently writing, tends to work a lot better for me. I also use the older ML models.
So why don't you turn it off? Toggling this is really easy.
I use VSCode more often than PyCharm nowadays (same reasons as TFA, it's just too heavy), but unless something has changed in the last couple of months, you can disable the AI completions
I’ve seen people code like this and it looks maddening. A sure fire way to break the state of flow and be distracted by nonsense.
For me, it's outright wrong half the time. But subtly wrong, the worst kind of wrong. At least in the month I kept it on for Rustrover while I was trying it out.
I just turned it off immediately in Rider in my professional work.. There's no specific AI policy for my client, but I'd rather not risk anything for now; I'll take full responsibility for any code I make on the dime.
Yeah, this resonates. I have a high end machine (9950x, 64 GB RAM, and a 5090) and Webstorm is PAINFULLY slow.
I don't use any crazy plugins and I hit one or more of these issues almost every day:
My daily ritual is restarting Webstorm from how much memory it leaked overnight.Many of us still use Jetbrains products because we're willing to put up with a little lag for the multitude of really useful features you get, but they need to attack performance seriously or they're going to risk losing folks.
> I tend to run older hardware,
> the tool is so fricken slow.
How old is "old hardware"? I've had no issues running CLion on a 2020 M1 Macbook Air and a i5-10400 (Linux). These projects are only in the hundreds of thousands of lines of code though.
> The install is gigantic on disk, leading me to avoid it on my older machines where space is limited.
I found that by default toolbox likes to keep old versions of the IDEs available for rollback. I disabled that and reclaimed tens of GB across all the products I use.
I run Dataspell and Pycharm on Intel Macs, and have been trying to decide whether to stick with JB products for writing Go or switch to VScode.
I don't find it terrible, but startups are slow and Dataspell often seems to get stuck in an very long slow loop of updating skeletons in my python package library. Probably not coincidentally, the package manager is apt to be the aprt of the IDEA that gets really sluggish and unresponsive, but I've also noticed problems with code completion/documentation popups. I don't have a vast number of packages installed, and my projects are pretty small, rarely more than 1000 lines of code. My code is also pretty clean and tidy because I'm not doing anything too complex.
> Toolbox yes I've noticed this too. I don't like it much, eg I had an old instance of dataspell that I uninstalled manually a couple of years ago but the ghost of it still shows up in Toolbox and there's no way to get rid of it. I sometimes feel like JB focuses too much on adding features but not enough on polishing them.
> Granted, I tend to run older hardware, but it seems that most other programs on my machine run fast and happy
I'd really like some context here. Because for some people this is like "My M4 is out of date now the M4 ultra is out" and for others it's "I think computers really took a step back when when we started to talk about Gigahertz and Gigabytes, a 386 is all I need".
Personally, I found JetBrains IDEs to be perfectly usable on a dual core third gen i5 laptop with 16GB of RAM. Thinkpad T530 from ~2013
It is of course sluggish to index large projects, but it's equally slow on my brand new Ryzen system. Otherwise it's completely fine. It was my main daily driver dev machine until 2024.
I wish that software is constantly updated and tuned for the past, not the future. I find quite ridiculous that we only keep pouring ram, disk, processor and yet tools lag behind. How is that possible?
Very true. Also, for some of us, network speed/latency can be the cause more than CPU speed
JetBrains to my understanding like a traditional IDE similar to Visual Studio (classic) that comes with a lot of stuff in the box that lighter weight text editor inspired development environments don’t have.
It is completely expected that it’s slower.
I remember my first job I had to request a new workstation just to tolerate using Visual Studio. (Actually, all I asked for was an SSD, but my manager over-delivered and went ahead with a whole new workstation)
CLion in particular is abysmal, yeah. so is RustRover. `rustacean.vim` gave me much better Rust UX than RustRover. although, for Android and serious Kotlin work, IntelliJ IDEA is the IDE and you can do nothing about it. yes, there is Kotlin LSP made by JetBrains themselves, but there are so many little things that are done faster in IDEA than Neovim unless you configure the hell out of it. Docker integration is one of hundreds of examples. meanwhile, assuming that you have set up your CMake properly, `clangd` just works and CLion has nothing to offer on top for anything but Unreal Engine. (didn't try Unreal support, so can't vouch for quality.)
same story with Rider and .NET: ReSharper, tied to Visual Studio, VS C*de, or Rider is just so much better than Roslyn-based analysis. and although you totally can put up some contraptions to prevent roslyn-ls from `ENOSPC`'ing your drive with leaked file watches in Neovim and benefit from even higher speeds, Rider is just faster than Visual Studio and that's enough.
Thank you for this post! 1) I've been considering Zed for a long time, but it hasn't worked well in my KVM. Due to the poor(?) ability to pass GPU through on my Ubuntu 24.04 machine. I have read that 26.04 may have fixed this so I'll try it again!
2) I am in the same boat with slowness. I've been using PHPStorm for over 10 years and it has always been "slow", but the newest pain point is that I will have claude in a terminal update a file. If the file is open in PHPstorm's viewing pain, it might take 10+ seconds to update the contents: I now always "update from disk" if I want to copy the contents outside of my KVM. It's just absolutely terrible workflow.
3. I have also found all of their AI efforts to not only be poorly executed, but executed in poor taste: it's just IN THE WAY rather than being helpful.
4. I mostly don't appreciate most of their features, generally. My flow is pretty simple. I no longer use most of the features. I just don't need the 8000lb elephant any more.
This on a 64GB ram Ryzen 7 5825U.
The speed thing is crucial for me. I'm bouncing between various projects regularly and use different editor windows for each project. I have a shell function called `zedme` that takes an optional argument, and opens the root directory of the current Git repo I'm in and also the additional file I named.
Open the whole project I'm in:
Open a specific file within the context of this project: In regular operation, in sizable projects, those commands each take about 1 second to open a whole project with tree navigation and all that, plus the specified file complete with syntax highlighting and language server etc.One moment, I'm happily working away in a terminal. One second later, I'm looking at a full-featured editor with all the tooling I want.
That's the performance bar, the expectation. Slower than that and I have to adapt my workflow to the editor, not vice versa, and I've never used an editor so great that I'm willing to tolerate that.
> I cannot for the life of me understand why it keeps re-indexing my codebase in certain circumstances. Perhaps this is some on-again off-again bug, but it comes back to bite me constantly.
This is the thing that drives me insane. The most annoying part is that they haven't built a proper cross-idea way to diagnose this. How hard is it to just have a UI, or even some text log, that says "I'm reindexing because X, Y, Z have changed" or something?
I wasn't going to pipe up because I wasn't sure that a Hackernews thread is a good substitute for an issue tracker... but it's related to new AI-driven workflows so I hope it chins the bar.
Now that I work on 3-8 concurrent projects, I want to have them most of them open so I can interact, sense-check, be engaged in the work. When I tear down one worktree, ALL projects open in RubyMine concurrently re-index. It kills my M3 Max and I have to force quit. Then when I restart RubyMine it does the same so I have to race to press the tiny pause button on just enough of the projects for it to not die. There's no way to tweak the re-indexing settings or determine when it will kick off. WHY it kicks off - i don't know.
This is the single thing that's led me to Zed/VSCode, or to not open more than 2 at a time.
I used JetBrains IDEs for years, and dropped it years ago because of this. It was maddening then and crazy to hear that after all this time it’s still a problem.
I swear: Good JVM settings can make Jetbrains IDEs fly with performance. Startup is way faster too.
I like ZGC. And having the IDE grab more RAM immediately on startup than the default. Something like Xms=4g or however it's done.
I cannot understand why Jetbrains keep the VM settings as constrained as they do. It's a big difference.
> I cannot understand why Jetbrains keep the VM settings as constrained as they do. It's a big difference.
A lot of the things JetBrains does are questionable, particularly the way they write UI applications. One would expect from a company that spawned a widely used JVM language and a JVM IDE that they would know how to write responsive Java UIs, but apparently, they don't. They are doing some really weird stuff like mixing up Skia with Swing, it’s just a big mess. The worst part is that most people will end up thinking Java is the issue. Ironically, Microsoft has done the same to Visual Studio which is incredibly sluggish these days.
Idk what has changed, but I used PyCharm like 10 years ago and it was fine. Way faster than other IDEs in fact. I only stopped cause I switched to vim.
I want Jetbrains to fly! What settings should I use?
JVM settings are always wrong no matter what, it's impressive
Java, how to make TLS not interoperate with anything, ever.
Just here to say that I've switched to lazyvim and have never looked back. There's something special about being able to combine tmux with resurrect and having every single project I am working on at the same time, being able to access it from any other machine via ssh and all with really low resource usage and lag. I mean I was programming yesterday with 6mbps and over 200ms of latency with hardware(typing follows host, not client) cursor over ssh, still felt like local meanwhile jetbrains couldn't keep up running in a vm over their remote gateway.
Thanks for the recommendation! I already use tmux and nvim but sort of half-heartedly, using VS Code for certain things. Lazyvim and resurrect look like just what I need to take the next step.
> There's something special about being able to combine tmux with resurrect and having every single project I am working on at the same time
Hey I can do that with VS Code! As long as I have 256 GB of RAM, that is.
I have 192gb and it still wasn't enough with I had different IDE's open all 4-5 projects each since they abandoned the "single IDE" approach awhile back. Under 32gigs of heap it performs horrible on bigger projects. Monorepos are a disaster.
When I started my professional work, Visual Studio was the recommended editor where I was, it was terrible, the Laptops we had were incredibly shit. My phone scored better on benchmarks than it, as such Visual Studio was not a good experience, I convinced my boss to let us try Rider, it was incredible, I no longer had to sit for 10s of minutes for a project to load, it was relatively snappy. My next job I started using Goland and was quite happy with it, at this point we had more high-power macs, but still great editor. I then moved on to Neovim, and then Helix in search of better ergonomics. I now have gone full circle and pretty much develop on a laptop of the same caliper as when i started working, however, because of a more lightweight editor helix, it doesn't feel like a slog, I wished I'd gotten it recommended back then, or been curious enough to give it a try, I'd saved myself many coffee breaks, and pain.
So if anyone is out there sitting in a similar position, give it a shot, you can get a better editor experience, whether you build it yourself with emacs, neovim, or use a more curated approach like helix, or zed for that matter. I mix and match Helix now with Claude Code, and it works really well. I don't want a single AI feature in my editor, only navigation, and auto complete. I'll have my AI on the side thank you ;)
I love PyCharm, but on my work laptop, it feels slow, and randomly likes to suddenly peg a CPU core to 100% for no apparent reason. It's not indexing as far as I can tell, it's just...stuck in some loop or something. My laptop fan goes wild. I've tried letting it sit for hours for it to figure out whatever the hell it's trying to do, but nothing.
The thing is, I don't know what I'd use otherwise. I demand an actual IDE, not a text editor that allows me to install a ton of plugins to make it into a half-baked IDE (ie, vim).
Maybe I should actually give VSCode a strong try. I've only used it as a code viewer for anything that's not Python.
I think this is due to their AI insight, they run locally a model and it start to burn the whole computer.
I don't use CLion, but I use Rider a lot. And at some point I had to modify their JVM settings and give it more RAM. It got much snappier. I think when there's not enough RAM for JVM it runs GC too much and it gets slow. I also don't really load the IDE all the time. It just always there, just sits open. I use it daily. No need to restart it. I admit it feels slower than some other apps, but not so slow really. I have a pretty dated Macbook Pro M1 and I would never characterize its performance as abysmal. "Could be faster" yes, but not abysmal by any measure.
Still a bit weird that this text editor has an immense amount of venture capital invested in it, but yeah, I'll probably end up giving Zed another go. Still, they've made some odd decisions in the past. It took a lot of community pushback just to get them to add that 'disable_ai' flag (mandatory feature for me).
Link: https://zed.dev/blog/disable-ai-features
I've been using JetBrains for 6 years, have tried and failed to switch off, but this article expresses my similar frustrations.
I've also been having massive problems with their sync- like between IDEs or even upgrading versions, I have to reconfigure all my plugins and settings bimonthly. And their AI assistant is so obnoxious- it is a chore to turn off and it randomly turns itself back on for me, ignoring the fact it kinda sucks.
The speed and reindexing issues are also a big problem. I had to hack my way around Tauri when I was using it a year or so back (not sure if this is still an issue). The tauri_ctx! macro apparently generated a lot of code, and slowed RustRover down to a crawl, where syntax highlighting couldn't keep up- it was unusable. I ended up having to move it to it's own crate.
The Android Studio by Jetbrains is an official IDE for Android. If you try simple refactoring, rename/move a class it crashes. It’s a bug that was there from the beginning. Despite issues opened with hundred comments, it was not fixed for decade. Couple of years ago the issue was closed “won’t fix”, as they handed Android Studio development and support to Google, and it’s still not fixed.
I also cut off JetBrains recently after a long relationship with their tools. I agree with the points made by the author. The tools are clunky resource hogs for seemingly no reason. I was really excited when JetBrains announced Fleet and promised a lightweight UI with the old analysis engines as lighter background processes. It seemed like it would solve a lot of the problems I had with their IDEs. That never materialized though. They say that Fleet integrated into Air, but Air is not an IDE. So now we're just left with the diminishing value of their traditional IDE offering and some floundering attempts to get into the AI market. What a shame.
I'm also done with JetBrains—just tried them again (RustRover) after a hiatus. It felt much slower than I remember, even after changing away from the default theme as others have suggested.
Having just made the switch to Kubuntu, I'm going to try Kate as my primary editor for a while. It's missing features, but it sure is snappy.
When the author says 'I tend to run older hardware', how old do they mean? I'm typing this message right now on my Thinkpad x220 from 2011, which is unfortunately too old to run Zed because its internal Intel HD graphics card doesn't support Vulkan. I'd be an everyday user if not for this.
Totally valid reasons, I haven't had the same experience but I mostly do work on Java or React & Rails in IDEA can't speak to CLion or RustRover etc.
Really my biggest thing for jetbrains is the cost, of course my company pays for a license on my main machine but I've been paying for a personal license as well and have been thinking of making the switch to Zed/NeoVim/VSCode etc. for a while just to save a few bucks every month.
Similar situation here. I primarily bounce between TypeScript, Python, and occasional Java -- all very well supported by JetBrains IDEs.
I occasionally try switching editors, most recently to vscode, but between the near flawless vim emulation, refactor functionality, and multi-language support I always come crawling back to JetBrains, despite the memory bloat and occasional buggy release.
Maybe that'll change someday, and I honestly hope something better comes along, but for now it just works better for my workflows and is worth the cost of admission.
Since many people are asking "how old", Here the numbers on my laptop:
- OS : windows - CPU : i7-1365U - GPU: no idea, probably Intel or a low end Nvidia - RAM: 32 Gb
The time to load (TtL) is defined as the time between I start the program and the IDE has completely loaded (nothing load or spin or whatever). For each test I open the IDE once first in order for potential updates and changes in configuration to apply, then I close.
Pycharm, clean install - no plugins, TtL to empty dashboard: 60s. Ttl to a small python project: 60s
VScode, old install with several plugins : TtL to empty dashboard: 8s. TtL to a small python project: 20s
Zed, clean install - no plugin: TtL to empty page: 2s. TtL to a small python project: 4.4s
I hope someone at jetbrains with enough power read what we are saying in this thread.... changes for the sake of changes are bad... when they did the change to the "new UI" I kind of stomach it.. because the option to go to the other one was there... but I don't know... how much benefit did everyone derive from it? But when the AI crazyness started it was f downhill... Jetbrains need to do a one thing... expose a connector so the ai can connect to the thing and do what it needs to do... so the IDE amplifies the model... go to definition... give me back all the errors... without having to play with bash, make the thing go fast... and please don't put the stuff we want to do behind a gated thing that only you can give us and charge us for...
I stopped paying and stayed in 2024.2, every once in a while I see if there is anything meaningful worth it there... nop
>expose a connector so the ai can connect to the thing and do what it needs to do...
They have done this now, they've implemented ACP so you can use any agent that supports that from any IntelliJ editor. They (optionally) provide an MCP server which the agents can also use.
Jetbrains’ good deterministic refactoring tools are what I like from them (and debugging).
Other than that, I must agree with this article.
Have you found a good replacement for that in other editors?
I hate it when I try to refactor or rename something in VSCode, which can be done deterministically, but it tries to use AI for it, which can mess things up.
It's not that easy. LSP does not have a standard way to expose things not specified. So, at best you need an LSP server exposing more + the LSP client to also understand it [2].
The best that comes to mind is nvim-jdtls [0].
Maybe at some point the LSP spec could be extended with more refactoring, or maybe there could be a open rewrite LSP server [1].
I wouldn't expect intellij to release a LSP server with all the refactoring tools, though.
[0]: https://codeberg.org/mfussenegger/nvim-jdtls
[1]: https://docs.openrewrite.org/
[2]: https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/specifi...
I really like datagrip when working with SQL. It works on most common databases, and allows for inline query results, giving a workflow comparable to jupyter notebooks. All Jetbrains IDEs using the same keybindings for e.g. multi line edit is another big plus, I have to learn only 1 IDE.
But there are clouds on the horizon. Every time I install the big data tools plugin, instability follows swiftly, untill I uninstall it again. I've noticed some cosmetic changes disturbing my workflow for no good reason.
Last update broke datagrip's AI completely, the plugin simply won't download and datagrip is not in the list of supported IDEs anymore. I lived with it for 2 days, but reported an issue anyway. Either I have a specific breakage or use a very specific setup, because I found no duplicate reports. Which, for such a major feature breaking, makes me feel like I live in an abandoned city.
I will still pay for next year's licence, it is still best in class for my needs. But if things stay like this for long, I'll have to migrate
Lol, I hear developers everywhere telling me Jetbrains products are getting worse with every release. But I wonder why do they tell me and not scream at jetbrains, it's not like I can fix that as sysadmin. Stop writing blogs and telling others, start rioting in their forums!
We did, very loudly. They deleted the threads. They deleted comments on their blog. Then the new CEO published a press release with a ton of outright blatant lies, and they deleted the comments calling it out.
They don't care.
If program has time to display startup banner - it is too slow. I was amazed how quickly Zed starts and it already has last project open and ready. Compared to JetBrains IDE, in some recent version they even added a toast informing that IDE is not responding. That tells much about application. And when whole UI keeps loading separate blocks like a website - absolutely annoying. Sometimes I don't even know if UI is actually ready to work, or clicking git branch selector will not yield any results, because something somewhere is still loading. Several GB size on disk with mostly unused plugins is just taking up space and makes loading IDE slower. They lost me as a customer when they dropped community edition of PyCharm. I was paying for PhpStorm for several years, until then, and dabbling with Python on the side. Having mandatory log in for free version is absurd.
I've always found JetBrain products interesting . I started my dev career using Borland C++ builder ans VB5. I went through most IDEs, including the infamous NetBeans and Eclipse (which made their own "non-swing" ui for "speed". Building a UI application in Java just never made sense to me. Its just not the technology gor that.
On the dev side, I started with IDEs and debuggers and whatnot, but later in my career they didn't give me enough value, and the time needed to configure them (I remember trying to setup RubyMine debugger.. yuck!).
Nowadays I mostly do vim VSCode and recently Cursor/Antigravity for the AI.
But my theory is that IDEs are going to disappear due to AI based development. Paradigms will be different.
Have you tried Jetbrains Fleet? Their new editor isn't too bad.
They've killed that, check the banner on the Fleet page:
>Update (May ’26): Fleet is now part of Air — our new agentic development environment. Download for free at air.dev →
> I cannot instantly create a new file
Agreed, but if you use IdeaVim you can:
> The startup times are just abysmalFor quick edits I just use Vim, but disabling unused plugins speeds up startup quite a bit.
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> Switching projects has abysmal performance
I reported that bug: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JUNIE-2563/Minor-UX-Slo...
Every once in a while, I have to figure out an IntelliJ indexing issue. I've got a personal Claude sub and access to Claude for work, so will not be using the JetBrains AI sub. If the indexing gets worse, or paying more for their AI becomes mandatory, I'll be done and back to Emacs, which is what I've been using for Claude anyway. Not there yet tho.
> Granted, I tend to run older hardware, but it seems that most other programs on my machine run fast and happy
Curious what hardware you’re on. I’m in the same camp with JetBrains products, performance has always been my biggest complaint. Apple M chips made a huge difference though. It’s still not my preference, but at least it’s a lot more usable now. Most of my colleagues run multiple instances daily without issues.
I am on the same boat. The only one I was still using was datagrip, over the last months it became unbearable slow and started crashing due to memory.
I've started moving away from that for the same reason. 2-3GB of RAM for a sql runner is ridiculous
Haven't used an IDE ever since I got used to vim and installed some basic plugins like YCM. Everything else feels too slow.
The main point of IDE is not code completion but lots of static and dynamic analysis to keep you from writing bad, slow, insecure, what have you, code.
Most of that stuff is proprietary and cannot be plugged into terminal.
The only attempt I’ve seen was actually by Jetbrains with Resharper beta for vscode
That's mostly delegated out to language servers now. There's no need for Zed and Emacs and Vim and so on to each individually have to re-implement renaming a Rust function.
I also highly doubt that any IDE, whatever that is, is better at analyzing Rust code than rust-analyzer is. Not every language will have a language server that excellent, but I hope that'll improve for those users.
Eh, haven't needed it. Especially now that there are AI coding agents, but even before that. If I really wanted to run some static analysis in IntelliJ, always had the option to do it separately from my real editor.
For me the nail in the coffin will come in 2027Q1: with CodeWithMe going away. Until then, the quality of editing code remotely together with the mostly clean refactoring and navigation options is a deal breaker.
If anyone has something roadmapped to replace CodeWithMe, it's worth bucks.
Jetbrains products have still the best git support without the need to install dozens of plugins.
CLI is much better.
The git CLI in notoriously bad. Nobody would need tools like https://frostming.github.io/legit/ if the git CLI would be any good. Also we would not need websites like https://ohshitgit.com/ Look at the commands: Even Claude Opus 4.7 struggles with that.
Any thoughts on alternative free software (preferably debian packaged) editors/IDEs with completion, jumping to definitions/declarations, etc?
I've used kdevelop a bit lately, it's ok.
I’ll occasionally have PHPStorm use up all available memory, but it tends to go away after a restart of the app. And this is something that happens maybe a few times a year?
It's very hard to compete with the massively-token-subsidized big players when our entire team is spending nearly 20x the claude code subscription cost in API token usage - it's impossible for anyone else to do it without eating huge losses.
Junie - their coding agent - was also a miss. I've had Rider for almost 10 years currently - but considering dropping it. Tradcoding is basically dead, and a lightweight text editor with tree-sitter has come a long way - and it's good enough to read/micro edit with anyway.
I feel bad for them as it's been such a stable product for decades of excellent development, but the world moves on.
For whatever reason zed takes forever to paste on my m1max MBP. Im talking at least 1.5s for a paste a few characters from clipboard or to duplicate a line.
After 10 years I still have no shortcut key to "duplicate line up" which was an eclipse feature that I loved.
So I also hate jetbrains, give me my shortcut get guys!!
Cmd+d on MacOS duplicates the current line. Is that what you want?
That is "duplicate line down" -- I want "duplicate line up" which copies the current line to the line above the cursor. My open request been sitting in jetbrains "ignore it" for many many years.
I don’t really get the difference but why don’t you use macros for that?
You can achieve anything with macros and you can give shortcuts to a named macros.
Macros are in the Edit > Macros menu. Add a shortcut to a macro in Settings , Keymap > search Macros, right click on Play Saved Macro and Add Keyboard Shortcut.
Install ideavim and press “yyp” :-)
I've always found it crummy that they keep clion foss, if foss projects and people dedicated to foss want anything in an IDE it's good c support
Unfortunately this is all true. I have also been using Clion to program C++ on Linux for almost a decade and the past 5 years the product has been in a free fall.
- every new release breaks something
Overall they seem to be more interested in shuffling the UI around and adding useless AI features nobody asked for while the core product is eroding fast. It really looks like they don't have tbe engineering capacity/talent to keep the product in shape and whatever capacity they have is misspent on wrong stuff.Sorry but Clion is over.
I too switched to zed recently, been using jetbrain IDEs for over 10 years. Noticed recently pycharm been acting up and hogging lot of ram!
We're building a product [1] to compete with DataGrip, a JetBrains product.
Many people told us we were crazy to compete with such a mature product as DataGrip before we got started.
It has been fascinating to speak to people who use database apps and to learn about their experiences.
Now, we have many, many customers telling us that they have cancelled their DataGrip/JetBrains sub and have switched to using our product, mainly due to speed but also cost.
Their products are really, really slow.
[1] https://dbpro.app
I'd love to give this a try, I work at a privacy sensitive company, can I ask in advance is it possible to opt out of:
> We automatically collect certain information when you use DB Pro:
> Device information (IP address, browser type, operating system) > Usage patterns and interaction with our services > Log files and analytics data > Cookies and similar tracking technologies
We'll add an option in the next version to choose if you want to share usage data.
Stay tuned for v2.1.4, coming this week.
I’m glad Matthew found an editor he likes but reading this I just couldn’t get that friendship ended meme out of my mind.
I get it, but, you'll have to pry my debugger with interactive live stack editing from my cold dead hands
I'm still happy with DataGrip, but I moved on from their editors many years ago.
I thought the constant reindexing was due to Shared Indexing, which seems now relegated to a plugin and off by default? Pretty sure that was the cause of my issues in ~2024/2025
Change your disk. Thanks me latter
I ran jetbrains ides for about six years, and recently switched back to Sublime but with LSPs. Nowadays with LLMs I just want to open an editor quickly to make changes, or navigate the code. Even the typescript LSP is faster to start than loading the IDE. And ripgrep is much faster than the fancy indexed search in the IDE. Not to mention, the search box would just half the time not work in the IDE or flat out lie? Also on linux the "go anywhere" modal would sometimes just be a black window or be positioned wrong.
They are doubling down on the state of things now by running "safe and stable" advertising, which doesn't make me feel like they're actually going to improve anything. I probably won't be renewing, either.
For me the big question with something like Zed is how/when does it get monetized?
How does Root/Ventures, V1.VC, Matchstick, Redpoint, and Sequoia get paid and what does that eventually look like for the people who have adopted Zed?
Does it enshittify? Does it just get bought by somebody else and languish?
IntelliJ is vastly superior to any other java IDE but their AI agent implementation sucks pretty hard. It's slower, crashes, there is enormous amount of bugs. Meanwhile VSCode have absolutely seamless implementation of Codex.
I do not understand what is their play but it seems to me like they missed last two years of very rapid and forming progress.
> the tool is so fricken slow.
of course an editor like Zed is faster than CLion but it makes little sense to compare the two. People use full blown IDEs like Jetbrains or Visual Studio for their heavier features like debugging and profiling, not because they feel snappy. When I write C++ my workflow has always been to use vim for editing and use VS for debugging.
I agree, Clion is superior in terms of features, but it loses really badly in terms of performance. I've recently switched off after being loyal to jetbrains for a long time. But this was mostly because AI negated the use of IDEs.
If you are on windows it’s probably your virus scanner eating your IO and CPU
For windows “Dev drive” (it is a windows feature) is a must.
Also at least Rider makes special tweaks with elevated access and what have you for antivirus exclusions
Can we talk about features like JavaFX being free (community) before and then starting to become paid ("ultimate" version) after update ?
Of course without telling: "while upgrading, you will loose functionalities except by buying our new edition"
> But there is one teeny tiny problem: the tool is so fricken slow.
Reminds me about that time i was working at one of the very large cloud providers. I had to edit a script in a source code repository and somehow the direction was something like "download the correct jetbrains ide, connect it to the internal license server, install the 20 plugins to make it work with the internal source code service, the internal code review service, the internal build service, the internal this and the internal that".
Spent like two days installing half of the shit and losing myself among the infinity of wiki pages explaining how to configure this hyper-dimensional tetris.
Then i gave up and just opened good old gnu emacs on my cloud desktop. Thank god there was an internal emacs user group that had written a few major and minor modes to work with the internal tooling.
I was done setting everything up in like one hour.
I unironically spent two years and a half working in gnu emacs running in a screen session, and it was much more productive than whatever jetbrains stuff they were recommending.
if anyone ever reads about this comment, please start to think about how to fuzz your software in a fast way. You don't need to correct or patch every bug, you just need to find where the algorithm A, B, C doesn't perform well, or where you have an allocation of 2 MBs for a linked list that should have been half of it.
I'm not a daily user of jetbrains product, but please. If there's any engineering/developers, start to use afl/cargo fuzz or whatever your fuzzer is, and spot bottlenecks, issues. I started to write software because I was looking at the quality of the very first softwares that were being fuzzed and it opened me some doors.
Lots of respect for what JetBrains has built, but I switched from PyCharm to Zed full-time about 6 months ago because while feature wise PyCharm was very good, I could not deal with the interminable "indexing". Fine if you have one project that you're working with all day long but I open a dozen different ones throughout the day and there was such a big project switching cost each time.
I've been very happy with Zed, and that was before it had as many features as it does now.
I have recently thinking about jumping ship, too, but for usability reasons. The Claude Code terminal is quite a desaster. Soft line breaks are copied to clipboard as hard line breaks (not great for console commands), it constantly loses focus and it has not good focus indicator, which is so super annoying that this alone made me already switch to VS Code for smaller projects. Also, keyboard navigation sucks (it randomly seems to switch between ctrl and shift enter for line breaks), no ctrl+a (very annoying if you want to delete a longer text). It does not seem to get much love from Jet rains, despite being as important as the editor itself. Using Claude in Webstorm feels like using a terminal in the 80s, and while others may find this cool I am not enjoying that.
Biggest killer of JetBrains IDEs has been simple: the “Switcher” now orders navigation destinations dynamically, whereas they used to be static. Destination keymap is not customizable. Ruins all of my muscle memory and makes me hate the IDE now. Someone at JetBrains please read this and make the Switcher destinations something I can customize in the keymap
As an eclipse fan, I may have experienced a teensy bit of schadenfreude while reading this.
Me too, however this is another case of exchanging IDE for text editor without understanding what is being lost, or never having used the IDE to its full potential in first place, thus not knowing what is being left behind.
I was in a meeting with a colleague about a PR for some python code. One of the things I noticed was that he had an unused module that contained an import of a non-existent class from another module. I know he uses Pycharm, so I mentioned to him that this kind of thing should be hard to miss, because the linter in Pycharm should have marked it, and the folder it's in, as red.
He tells me, and I quote, "Oh, all the files are red."
Do you already have a good criminal defense lawyer, or do you need a referral? Because whatever you did next was justified, in my opinion.
This was the third wtf in that same meeting, so I think I did ok waiting to lose my cool until then.
Second wtf you may ask? In the goal of changing the storage of our data, he implemented 3 of ~10 behaviors of the existing library, and silently ignore all calls to the remaining 7. Guess which 3 were never used in the existing library!? :D
20 years "experience". Total incompetence. I should correct that: 17 years. After he was hired, during our first lunch together, he admitted he did nothing the last 3 of his previous employment, getting stuck in some org void where he just kept quiet and sat at his desk every day.
Yes, I'm on my way out.
Cowabunga. I do totally believe you, though. I was the guy doing fizzbuzz screens at a prior job. Before that, I would not have believed the failure rate for that step of the process. "The person has a job as a senior software engineer? Of course they'll ace fizzbuzz! It's insulting to even suggest otherwise!" And yet. I bet at least a third of the candidates simply could not pass that to save their lives. I went out of my way to be the friendly, relaxed, conversational interviewer, too. I never wanted to turn away a good candidate because I intimidated them or made them feel uncomfortable. And with all that, it still didn't work out.
A concrete example: one person could not get it through their head that they could write a function to return the correct value, then unit test that function with arbitrary known values. My question: "how do you know if it gets the right answer for 1,000,000,000,005?" What I wanted:
or something similar. What they offered:"OK, we'll loop from 1 to n and write each of the values out. Then we can compare the contents of that file with a test case!"
"How is that going to work for values like 1 trillion something?"
"We can compress it!"
"And how long is this unit test going to take?"
"Well, let's assume we can process a million answers per second..."
"Aren't you going to run out of hard drive space at some point?"
"We can use `tail` to get the last few lines!"
"OK, let's start over. Can you imagine any way to test some arbitrary value in O(1) time?"
"Nope, can't be done."
"Sigh."
There was a binary search problem that I gave in my interviews, in the context of test and measurement. So, instead of reading a value of the monotonic curve at some index in an array, you would have to set a power supply to some voltage (independent) then read the resulting value from a volt meter (dependent). So, exact same concept, different way to "index" and retrieve the value.
To help my explanation, I had a plot to show an example monotonic y=x^2 as a blue line and an example target value as a horizontal dotted red line.
One guy I had said something like, "You can start at the left of the image, then go down looking for a blue pixel. If the blue pixel is at the red line, you have found your value".
So, he wanted to search the image of the plot rather than the data behind the plot. I tried to get him to understand that was an example, and that we had the data, and that he would have to do the measurements himself, but it just resulted in a short interview.
I eventually told all the hiring managers that I could help interview again after their screening process was fixed, at which point I learned that they just removed software from the screening process to save time. This was a ~50% software position.
Same org as the dork above...
> or never having used the IDE to its full potential in first place
As more and more people delegate stupid things to their agent, this type of person will become increasingly common. Products like RustRover and CLion will be a much harder sell to audiences that don't even use an LSP in their day-to-day workflow.
JetBrains is probably working on a contingency plan as we speak.
That’s correct. Their new IDE, Fleet , pivoted to an AI first editor , but not sure if they have already released something.
It depends.
For C# development Jetbrains Rider is second to none.
The number of static analysis, refactorings, inspections, dynamic analysis, slow code paths hightlights, profiling, etc.
It just cannot be done in neovim no matter how I would like to switch.
For C++ (like the OP’s case) — maybe the situation is different. I’ve heard CLion is a meh.
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Also Jetbrains IdeaVim plugin is the best vim emulation I’ve seen. Nothing comes close with vim plugins support, vimrc, and what have you.
I tried vim mode in Zed — it’s a joke. Immediately uninstalled and got back to vscode, at least it has some vimrc support for custom bindings.
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Also I don’t get the start-up argument: just don’t close the app, dummy :-). YMMV of course depending on the language.
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tldr; there is nothing to replace rider with. Because Rider is an actual IDE with tons of proprietary bells and whistles that actually matter
Then again, my dev machine is a Threadripper with tons of ram. I would probably sing a different song if I needed to work on a macbook air with 16gb of ram.
> Also Jetbrains IdeaVim plugin is the best vim emulation I’ve seen. Nothing comes close with vim plugins support, vimrc, and what have you.
Once every year or so I get annoyed with a bugged JetBalrains update or memory leaks. IdeaVim has been one of the main things pulling me back to JetBrains for a while now, although the neovim extension in vscode is also very good these days.
still king if you develop java or scala. i've tried things like metals and vim but its clunky and always go back. if you work enterprise job then idea is the only game in town.
TLDR an IDE is a large program, buy ram.
This fellow isnt switching IDEs, just going to a tiny editor instead. I use JB daily and I despise their quality but they do get things right eventually (eg wayland). Ignore AI and remote development, use wayvnc. Open symlinked projects in a single window. Connect agents via IDE Index MCP (not the official one). Use a sidecar editor for magical autocomplete / niche LSP extensions (mirroring the IDEs config). You cant replace an IDE with an editor…
Seems like apples to orange comparison. Text editors are always fast because they just don't provide that many features compared to an IDE. Language servers in my experience do not work that well for large projects. They feel pretty dumb. Refactoring tasks that miss some of the references is just one example. I frequently use multiple Jetbrains products like Rider, Idea, Webstorm, PyCharm, and CLion. No major complains. It takes some time to get going but after that it is mostly smooth sailing.
Yeah sadly it is getting slower and slower. I use a 3+ year old version, which is lightning fast. When I just keep the right arrow down it goes through code like a charm. The 2026 version is lagging like an overloaded ox.
The problem with new editors is that the initial friction of configuring every shit that annoys you takes too much time. I tried zed, but gimme a break, wtf has time to learn all the peculiarities.
So disappointed in jetbrains.
IDEs are dead in the age of agentic coding.
Trying to find the stable point of agentic coding is like trying to catch a falling knife. Will you still need to look at diffs? I for one no longer make any edits, as a policy - I either tell the agent to fix it, or tweak a skill or memory or doc so it doesn't make the same mistake a second time, or configure something adversarial. But does that continue indefinitely?
Agreed within the narrow confines of web dev (which is all that I do). I used to write 500-1000? LOC per day but now I've built several full fledged (250k+ arr) sites with more features than I've ever been able to implement in such a short time: all without editing a single line of code.
My guess is they are still very useful for more difficult code! But yeah, I can't imagine ever caring about "code" any more, and therefore cannot fathom the need for a full fledged IDE.
Say what?
I rather have my agents talking to my IDEs.
There are people who move into the future, and there are those who stick their heads in the sand. It was ever thus.
There's still room for something vaguely IDE shaped, but it's not going to be code oriented.
I have been coding since 1986, pleny of futures have come by.
Eventually you learn to figure out which gold diggers will get lucky when the caravan crosses town.
I've been coding since 1990 myself. But I'm all in on AI.
I'm long past the need to code everything by hand; I've written editors, compilers, DOS TSR routines in assembler, disassemblers, debuggers, all sorts. I don't see any coding mountains remaining that I have a burning desire to climb. When I interact with an agent, I'm concerned about architectural nudges and fairly high-level details. And I anticipate climbing further up the abstraction stack over time.
Product management is increasingly vital; it's becoming very, very easy to implement the wrong thing, and you need to rip it out again. Editorial discipline is needed.
What I see where I am standing is that many don't code anything more, they get shown the door instead.
Because between SaaS, iPaas, Vercel, Nelify, Workato, Boomi, automatic translations, content generation, among many other tools, the team can be reduced to one third of the size it was like a decade ago, for the same content delivery.
Still, many of those tools have IDE integrations for the lucky ones that stay on board.
>IDEs are dead in the age of agentic coding.
I'm glad that works for you, but you'll pry my free software from my cold dead hands. :)