alt Hacker NewsNo More JetBrains Products for Me
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> 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 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.
Well, Zed is a text editor with some plugins, while JetBrains products are full-blown IDEs, with abilities Zed will never offer.
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.
> 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 Because for some people this is like "My M4 is out of date now the M4 ultra is out" and for others it's "I think computers really took a step back when when we started to talk about Gigahertz and Gigabytes, a 386 is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".
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?)
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.
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
$ 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.
> 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 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.
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 cursor over ssh, still felt like native meanwhile jetbrains couldn't keep up running in a vm over their remote gateway.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
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.
> I cannot instantly create a new file
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
Haven't used an IDE ever since I got used to vim and installed some basic plugins like YCM. Everything else feels too slow.
Jetbrains’ good deterministic refactoring tools are what I like from them (and debugging).
Other than that, I must agree with this article.
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.
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?
Have you tried Jetbrains Fleet? Their new editor isn't too bad.
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'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
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!!
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.
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.
Sorry but Clion is over.
If you are on windows it’s probably your virus scanner eating your IO and CPU
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?
> 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 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.
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"
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.
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 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.
> 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.