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- I enjoy JetBrains IDEs alot. Altough I mainly use Dataspell and Datagrip and not Intellij but they make my life easier. Specifically when connecting to new DBsby mastermage
- Sometimes I also feel that Idea is too slow, especially for smaller projects or languages where I do not need top tier support. ie. I am backend rust and python programmer. I also have to work with JS/TS and C++ projects but I mostly only read through them.
I started using neovim with plugins if syntax highlighting and good navigation is enough. I have also set up ideavim configuration to be as close to neovim as possible. Now I can easily switch between Idea and neovim with almost the same workflow.
by jbvlkt - I wrote an LSP for kotlin and java recently and it's so annoying how tightly coupled all the LSP stuff is in IntelliJ to the IDE itself they have a outside LSP project which seems to be going very slow or nowhere is very sad.
Note I tried to use IntelliJ to build it the performance was not nearly as nice as I would have liked still better than a lot of LSPs but still.
I know a bunch of folks have tried it but I think only Jetbrains can build a good one, unless someone actually goes all in on solving this for a few months and rebuilds the parsing and types systems outside of the Jetbrains toolchain and ecosystem.
Java is likely easier but it's also quite jank in terms of how existing solutions work.
But I like projects like this, I am not against IntelliJ it must be great had been great when I was learning but I want a lsp to use for scripts and the small edits, opening a massive IDE is very overkill for the kinds of small changes I like to make now.
by minraws - I will quote the blog post announcing Kotlin as project, so naturally it is tied to InteliJ.
"The next thing is also fairly straightforward: we expect Kotlin to drive the sales of IntelliJ IDEA. We’re working on a new language, but we do not plan to replace the entire ecosystem of libraries that have been built for the JVM. So you’re likely to keep using Spring and Hibernate, or other similar frameworks, in your projects built with Kotlin. And while the development tools for Kotlin itself are going to be free and open-source, the support for the enterprise development frameworks and tools will remain part of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, the commercial version of the IDE. And of course the framework support will be fully integrated with Kotlin."
https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2011/08/why-jetbrains-need...
by pjmlp - IntelliJ Git integration is so good I wish it would be a standalone client.
- And I hate it with a passion. The fact they they introduced their own terminology, their own lifecycle, always makes me doubt what will happen when I use any feature of their client.
Magit OTOH stays much closer to the true git. Although for anything slightly more esoteric I still prefer native git cli.
by koiueo - Funnily that's the one feature I dislike in IntelliJ and thus relies on another GUI
Otherwise I like having everything in one place: code, containers, databases, remotes...
by wiether - You can do "idea diff file1 file1" to open a popup with their diff tool.by 0x1ceb00da
- I'm trying to avoid IntelliJ because I only need it for editing TeamCity build configuration files, that are written in a Kotlin based DSL [0], and autocomplete and linting are be very helpful.
I've tried Eclipse and VS Code but I don't get them to autocomplete or detect syntax correctly. Would any LSP help me with that? As I have no idea about Java, Kotlin or Gradle, everything is kinda confusing to me...
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0: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/teamcity/kotlin-dsl.htmlby tecleandor - As a very heavy user of IntelliJ and associated family of IDEs, I’d say they are extremely bloated compared to a few years ago. My latest annoyance with IDEA has been extremely slow disk sync. If I edit something outside the IDE, it takes a while to appear in it.
They should cut down the binary size and ship a leaner version without all the bundled plugins. They should improve performance on extremely large projects (both memory and IO).
Although I have let my personal Ultimate subscription expire, I still use it at work because debugger, codenav and autocompletion are still best in class.
by microflash - > and forces you into a closed proprietary ecosystemby TiredOfLife
- Exactly, I've been using their community edition for years for Kotlin development. Works fine for normal day to day development needs. I had a paid subscription for a while that I just let expire because I rely more on agentic coding tools these days and I just don't write a lot of code by hand at this point. The paid version adds a lot of deeper integrations and tools that you may or may not need. Personally, I don't really miss most of that. These days the community edition and the paid edition are the same. But if you don't take a subscription, the paid stuff is unavailable.
As a company, Jetbrains is a private company. It's one of the few large software companies that managed to get there without selling out to VCs or the vultures on the stock market. Of course they want to make a profit but they also create a lot of value for developers. Including a lot of open source things. I think it's nice that it's still possible to create a business by bootstrapping and without compromising your values.
- The Metals documentation includes instructions for setting it up with Emacs. I followed them, and everything works, including worksheets.by phmx
- People will go to great lengths to avoid paying for what is, arguably, an outstanding product from a great company, then think nothing of spending the same amount at Starbucks.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a company scrutinized and nitpicked as much as JetBrains.
by DrProtic - Well its a russian company, and took part in the solarwinds hack, that was directly funded by the fsb. So, yeah, it should ve scrutinized, nitpicked and avoided at all costs.
Its 2026, there is no need for a proprieraty IDE that is stuck in the early 2000s.
by phplovesong - The fact we still don't have a decent Java language server is one of my canaries for the fact that LLMs still, generally speaking, can't ship. There is undeniably demand for this sort of thing, but nobody is coming to meet it. (jdtls, bless it for trying, is just not good)
- why do you need a java language server? Let them use the same tooling you would use in CIby whazor
- My understanding was the biggest issue has always been that javac is a poor foundation for any kind of live tooling like LSPs?
It’s less “make me a Java LSP” than “rewrite javac around incremental compilation and exposing a semantic DB”. Which sounds like a much harder problem.
by mechanicum - I had this thought yesterday where I wondered if there was a way to run an Android app in the browser (definitely non trivial, but something I would expect to exist in some form) and nothing. If LLMs are as good as people say they are, I should be seeing plenty of useful projects like that popping up but.... I just see harnesses and other random thingsby lilbigdoot
- Nah, there is little demand for it that's the reason.
LLMs don't need a LSP, they work better without it often. Most Java devs use IntelliJ or another IDE with its inbuilt thing. For everyone else the existing one is good enough for incidental usage.
So ~no one cares
by dtech - How is the Oracle one? It has better reviews in VS Code marketplace than the Red Hat one (jdtls)by timanderson
- The one in VS Code seems fine. It's not quite intellij level, but what is.
And speaking on llm and lsp. The new PHP lsp PHPantom (with help of llms) is approaching jetbrains offering fast.
by TiredOfLife - I am actively working on a fast language server for Java and kotlin.
I’m driving it daily and it’s much faster than IJ for what I need, although it doesn’t provide all the diagnostics that IJ does…
It’s on github.com/pepegar/ktlsp if you’re curious.
by jlgarhdez - Exactly. I've been trying to say this. Some people think that because people can write CRUD APIs and end-user apps with AI, no-one will need to write code anymore.
There is so much to be built in terms of tooling and libraries where we need tight, solid, well-crafted, original, unique code.
by adamddev1 - I agree that IntelliJ is a monster of a resource hog, but I have yet to find an editor where code navigation is as good. That's basically all I use it for these days, in the days of LLMs, and I still think it's worth it. VSCode, especially for golang, is terrible. I might be holding it wrong, but I've really tried, and it's just not good enough.
Before LLMs, when I still refactored by hand, coworkers who were using vim or vscode used to ask me to do big refactors, because IntelliJ always got it right, whereas with the other editors it was hit-or-miss.
by laszlojamf - > code navigation
Do you mean GUI, keyboard shortcuts, search dialogs, all the above?
I'm frustrated with (find and) search. So many options. It's both too much and too little.
But what would something better look like? Spotlight (Alfred, Raycast)? fff (fast fuzzy finder)?
I'm hoping I'll know it when I see it.
by specialist - Saying that VS Code is terrible for Go is simply false. The Go extension is regularly updated and works extremely well. Sure, it lacks some advanced refactoring features available in IntelliJ, like function parameters reordering, but gopls supports most refactoring you'd need to do day to day..by f3408fh
- This is my experience and it really sucks that Jetbrains has devolved into such a poorly run company. It's clear a lot of their real talent who cared about the programming side and refactoring left years ago. Now it seems like all their product decisions are from bog standard non-technical business people who chase buzzwords.
This is a major problem for them because they fragmented their IDE codebase so much properly maintaining it requires resources and people they don't have and would have to invest years of effort to replace. But that doesn't maximize quarterly profit, so it's left to decay and we get hourly LLM plugin updates.
- > But what do you actually get with IntelliJ? A massive, monolithic Java application that frequently hogs 8GB+ of RAM, locks up your system while “indexing pre-built binaries,” and forces you into a closed proprietary ecosystem.
This is just exaggeration. I use IntelliJIDEA everyday (on mac) with multiple projects open and tbh they have optimized the IDE a lot to make it faster. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's getting better. Also it's not closed source. The core of the IDE is open source (https://github.com/jetbrains/intellij-community) and for some specific framework support (e.g. Spring) are available on Ultimate.
- I'm also on a mac, but in the last few years performance and memory usage has gotten pretty bad. Though we use Intellij for mostly Angular / Node projects. A colleague of mine had reverted to an older major release because it runs better on our Macs. He ended up switching over to a popular open source IDE and hasn't looked back.by mdawwg