> IntelliJ (actually Android Studio based on IntelliJ) was my first real IDE and real programming experience. I was so blown away !

I switched to IntelliJ back when people where still arguing which of the two between Eclipse or NetBeans was better (fools!): that is, before some of the commenters here were born.

Heck, I bought IntelliJ when the world was ending in the Mayan calendar, it was something like 75% off because the world was going to end in a few weeks anyway.

But since 10+ years I'm using only... Emacs.

Emacs now with tree-sitter, LSPs, native-compilation, magit and the LLMs at ease with Un*x CLI tools make it so that IntelliJ looks like a behemoth. From a glorious past but still a behemoth.

Add in VS for .NET languages and C++ (hot reload, debugging capabilities), and the beloved Delphi/C++ Builder duo as well.

To this day there isn't anything like C++ Builder, if you want the famous VB dev experience, but with C++.

The dream is something batteries-included but still radically hackable. Emacs is slowly making this feasible via smaller and smaller "starter kits" as it adds new features. It's not perfect, and maybe this approach will never yield a fully productized solution like IntelliJ. But getting a full-featured Emacs setup hasn't meant building the world from scratch in a long time!

I remember it was pretty slow even like early 2020s. But since they have introduced the new UI design IDE, somehow they have optimized it.

I think they made it modular so only the core module that is needed are loaded and some modules are loaded only if it's needed by a plugin. Also, they have optimized indexing as well. I remember the whole thing slowed down when it starts to index a medium size gradle project, but now it runs the indexing in the background but the rest of the IDE quite responsive.

However, it seems like in general they are moving at right direction when it comes to optimizing the core of the IDE and all other functionalities comes as plugins and you can just uninstall them if not needed. I use the community edition every day and recently I have been using claude code for coding, but I still use debug console most of the time. I haven't found another IDE which is as powerful as IDEA when it comes to debugging a JVM language project.

Yup. It's been particularly bad since around 2023/2024 and only got worse with all the AI crap, though I think that's been almost a useful scapegoat for them recently

I don’t know, using Vim and Exuberant Ctags can give you a significant part of these features for a very lower footprint. But to be clear, it’s not a ready-to-go path on parity with DX that IntelliJ provides.

Hackers are often exceptionally good at optimizing the hidden parts no one give a shit until everything crumble under systemic slowness, but they often also are very bad at designing even a decent UX for everything else regarding in-your-face aspects.

It's a bit strange to project a personal experience with one product onto all other products by the same vendor, even if those products use shared platform parts. Not to dismiss your claim, it's just IDEs (code engines specifically) are naturally pretty complicated pieces of software, so the experience may vary.

The claim that 8Gb RAM is required just for Intellij seems to be at least overgeneralization (also depends a bit on how you count RAM usage; e.g. do you count all mmaped files as RAM usage even when pages are not loaded?). Can be true for some projects, but I've been working on decently sized Java/Kotlin codebases (~250k locs) with way less RAM allocated for Intellij (again, your experience may vary). Even Intellij and Kotlin projects themselves have been usable with less memory, at least some time ago.

What's more baffling, though, is how an LSP would be significantly better if it is based on the same IDE core, just running headlessly? I think there may be an independent non-IDE based LSP for Scala, but both Java and Kotlin LSP are based on existing IDEs engines (Java LSP is based on Eclipse engine, Kotlin LSP is based on Intellij).

A quote from the kotlin-lsp GitHub repository: > The language server is based on the most recent IntelliJ IDEA version and proprietary parts of JetBrains Air and Fleet products, making it partially closed-source.

https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlin-lsp

Counterpoint: use intellij on full stack apps with cdk, react, sqls and whatnot, multiple open at a time, without any problem.

I've got Android Studio open now, while also working in several PyCharm projects, IntelliJ and WebStorm. No issues at all on macOS.

I feel the same about VS Code, it's probably some of the plugins but sometimes, especially when LLMs make edits, memory usage explodes until my system breaks down and force pauses some apps until I kill some of them.

I should go back to Zed, maybe use the CLI interface for agentic programming instead of the UI.

Also ironic given that emacs with a LSP server is more than capable of slowing a dev machine to a crawl

I've used IntelliJ since 2004 and it's always been a resource hog and always perpetually just beyond the faculties of the typical developer workstation. They've struggled with it since forever.

I don't think they've devolved at all. They've always been a mix of brilliance (far ahead of everyone else on refactoring and semantic analysis, etc) and challenges. And it has a lot to do I think with just being a relatively small team.

And the wave of LLM/agentic stuff has been a serious threat to them. Their efforts with Junie and the things before that have been faltering steps.

I do think it's beyond the point where they probably should just rewrite the core things they do in Rust. Their issue since day one has been it seems they're in a perpetual fight with the JVM garbage collector.

Significant portion of their staff left in 2022, when they decided to relocate from Russia and they keep bleeding engineers ever since. Despite registration in Prague, JetBrains has always been a Russian company with dominantly Russian employees.

I think OP talks about code navigation, which is objectively terrible on vscode in general

Sorry, but gopls doesn't even support moving files/packages and updating references properly - which is basic, tablestakes, "everyday" feature supported out of the box by Goland.

I can list 2 dozen other things that Gopls doesn't support but Goland does.

They have a real weakness when it comes to designing something that doesn't have a design precedent. There are no good java language servers, so it can't design a good java language server.

You can also show this with by e.g. asking an LLM to design an internet search engine in Java, for which there doesn't exist very many examples, and my own Marginalia Search and my devlog is one of few design examples it has to reach for.

Even mentioning nothing of MS just using similar constraints, you'll get a nearly identical design to Marginalia Search. Algorithm choices will be the same. Document and term IDs will encoded in a similar succinct fashion (in one of my experiments, the chosen design was binary compatible). Architecture will be the same. Services and components will to a significant degree have the same names and even using the same non-standard vocabulary. It isn't word for word identical, there sure are a lot of coincidental similarities that notably don't exist with search engines implemented in other languages.

To be clear, it’s not supported by a compiler, but rather plain tree sitter syntax parsing. I’m embarking on a bigger project to create a linter (and integrate) without relying on JVM or a compiler at all, but IDK when that’s gonna come.

That's just a wrapper for jdtls. I mean it works on some projects, but fails on many gradle builds and is basically just running the Eclipse IDE headlessly.

This is probably the one contender:

https://github.com/georgewfraser/java-language-server

and it kinda works, but it's also a bit lacking.

What's missing from PHPantom?

I care, which is existence proof that someone cares.

> LLMs don't need a LSP, they work better without it often

How could LLM's work better without LSP when LSP is something don't interact with?

We have a java compiler API nowadays that solves this.

These are two different things; a language server would be a standardized intermediate layer between said CI tooling and any editor for inline / realtime checking, code suggestions and formatting.

JetBrains is and has always been a Czech (and, thus, EU) company, not a Russian one. Yes, the founders are Russian, but that does not make the company so. They did have Russian offices, but closed them after the start of the Ukraine war [1].

The only confirmed link to the SolarWinds attack seems to be that SolarWinds was using TeamCity (JetBrains' CI/CD product) and that this was alledgedly used as a "gateway" to SolarWinds' systems - which doesn't require any cooperation from JetBrains, just an unpatched security issue. In fact, a patch by JetBrains for the exploited issue seems to have been available, but was not installed [2].

So while any company deserves scrutiny, these particular allegations against JetBrains smell like FUD to me.

See also JetBrains' own statements on the SolarWinds thing: https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2021/01/06/statement-on-the-...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBrains

[2]: https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa...

So we get to replace it for a programmer's editor from the early 1980's instead, good call.

They closed all their russian office locations at the start of the Ukraine war afaik so I wouldn't call it russian any more.

> Its 2026, there is no need for a proprieraty IDE that is stuck in the early 2000s.

This is the best IDE for Java. And it is nowhere near 2000s, it is modern and the best one can use for Java.

Source: trust me bro

I keep finding interesting that some devs refuse to pay for tooling like every other profession, yet they don't take pull requests as salary either.

What are you using instead?

Given how much outside support they have received they could also make a paid lsp available like they had Resharper, I would be willing to pay for a paid lsp if I use the language enough.

10$ a month for an LSP with all the bells and whistles, should be easier to maintain than an entire IDE tbh. And they can sell me on advanced features in their IDEs through it.

I just don't want to have to open a bulky IDE anymore, IDEs just suck for me as a development tool.

Nah Lenovo ThinkPad