No more JetBrains products for me

threethirtytwo

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.

panny

As an eclipse fan, I may have experienced a teensy bit of schadenfreude while reading this.

barrkel

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?

edbaskerville

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.

pjmlp

Well, Zed is a text editor with some plugins, while JetBrains products are full-blown IDEs, with abilities Zed will never offer.

ademup

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.

mikert89

So disappointed in jetbrains.

himata4113

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.

azuanrb

> 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.

sosodev

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.

wiseowise

> 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?

jmward01

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.

samiv

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. Sorry but Clion is over.

rc_kas

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!!

AnthonBerg

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.

lousken

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!

upmostly

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

kstrauser

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.

traderj0e

Haven't used an IDE ever since I got used to vim and installed some basic plugins like YCM. Everything else feels too slow.

foooorsyth

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