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.
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/
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.
IDE's format and display text
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 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.
Not sure if I'm missing out on much today.. but initially I despised the minimalist interface for the new UI.
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.
it's sad, but what can you do.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Zed, helix, nvim for small files in gui or terminal.
A solid Slow start IDE for solid extended time work
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.
- 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.
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.
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 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.
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?)
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.
people aren't capable to write plugins to intellij cuz it's too difficult to comprehend
> 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 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.
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".
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Open the whole project I'm in:
$ zedme
$ zedme foo.rs
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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 ;)
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'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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I stopped paying and stayed in 2024.2, every once in a while I see if there is anything meaningful worth it there... nop
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.
Other than that, I must agree with this article.
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.
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...
They don't care.
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
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.
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 do not understand what is their play but it seems to me like they missed last two years of very rapid and forming progress.
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.
I've been very happy with Zed, and that was before it had as many features as it does now.
>Update (May ’26): Fleet is now part of Air — our new agentic development environment. Download for free at air.dev →
Agreed, but if you use IdeaVim you can:
:e src/my_new_file.txt
For 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...
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.
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
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.
If anyone has something roadmapped to replace CodeWithMe, it's worth bucks.
I've used kdevelop a bit lately, it's ok.
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.
So I also hate jetbrains, give me my shortcut get guys!!
- 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.
Sorry but Clion is over.
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.
> We automatically collect certain information when you use DB Pro:
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Stay tuned for v2.1.4, coming this week.
He tells me, and I quote, "Oh, all the files are red."
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.
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?
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.
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.
Also at least Rider makes special tweaks with elevated access and what have you for antivirus exclusions
Of course without telling: "while upgrading, you will loose functionalities except by buying our new edition"
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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…
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?
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'm glad that works for you, but you'll pry my free software from my cold dead hands. :)