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.
Almost 15 years later, nothing else matches the out of the box experience of IntelliJ, atleast for JVM based languages.
To this day there isn't anything like C++ Builder, if you want the famous VB dev experience, but with C++.
20 years ago it was the fast lean option when there was Netbeans and Eclipse. Today it's ok, still good feature wise but fast and lean it is not anymore when I've used it for Scala oand Kotlin.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
There is so much to be built in terms of tooling and libraries where we need tight, solid, well-crafted, original, unique code.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a company scrutinized and nitpicked as much as JetBrains.
Its 2026, there is no need for a proprieraty IDE that is stuck in the early 2000s.
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.
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.
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.htmlNote 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.
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.
The main improvements lately were:
- line/function prediction
- Claude Code plugin
And I can use Claude Code in any terminal. So I've switched to zed.dev and use Claude there. Wish it had the line prediction though.
While Metals for Scala was an overhaul from the former Eclipse plugin (and Ensime) plus early experiments embedded in the Scala 3 compiler. And Metals v2 is yet another rewrite.
Metals is architectured in a completely different way, see the BSP: https://build-server-protocol.github.io
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Specifically in the PHP community? Legitimately curious...
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.
It's not trivial though and it's a good thing I am willing to tinker and explore. I got a decent Neovim development setup going in a few days with the help of blog posts but Emacs is a whole different story, with a lot of legacy terminology and a lot of very sporadic resources. Doom suffered (for me) from a lot of complexity, assumed emacs knowledge, and confusion for how to customize. Emacs Kickstart was closer to a jumping off point but still had a lot of confusing things going for it.
I'm still making the leap because I see the potential to have a truly customizable IDE that's customized to me (and not throwing AI things at me every few weeks) but sheesh, it's not trivial.
This week I had an LLM help me debug and resolve a subtle issue with Magit via TRAMP on macOS targets, and resolve it, plus a bunch of other small enhancements and fixes to my config. If your LLM agents have access to your Emacs config and installed packages, they can be really helpful in co-exploring your setup, explaining the behavior of built-ins as well as third-party plugins, and drafting new configuration.
Development is active, there are still great Emacs teachers creating books, blog posts, and videos, LLMs are genuinely good with Emacs, and the LSP ecosystem for Emacs is increasingly mature and well-integrated. There's never been a better time to jump in with Emacs, seriously.
On my MBP M4 or my Linux laptop, I never get the impression that it's bloat.
Prior to using IntelliJ I had been a Eclipse user and I've never experienced even 5% of the pain I had with Eclipse since moving to IntelliJ.
When everything is going to shite, I welcome with pleasure my yearly invoice from JetBrains, thinking that, at least, there is a company pushing quality software that deserves my money.
IJ is great for JVM langs.
Sure one can cross-use the above, but that's harder.
Still great to have an IDE agnostic Kotlin LSP!
100% true.
Also, the problem I have with these magic thingies is that I don't know what to do if the magic stops working. With tools that just does one thing, I can easily figure out the point of failure and fix it.
PyCharm, on the other hand, was always great to use. But since VS Code gives me pretty much everything I need for my daily work without demanding too much from my system, I've finally moved away from JetBrains.
(1) It's a menu option these days.
I should go back to Zed, maybe use the CLI interface for agentic programming instead of the UI.
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.
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.
I can list 2 dozen other things that Gopls doesn't support but Goland does.
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.
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.
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.
And speaking on llm and lsp. The new PHP lsp PHPantom (with help of llms) is approaching jetbrains offering fast.
This is probably the one contender:
https://github.com/georgewfraser/java-language-server
and it kinda works, but it's also a bit lacking.
I try VSC with Metal twice a year. It works fine for small projects. But for bigger projects it lacks the more holistic approach that IntelliJ has and feels more like a text editor with smarts bolted on than an IDE.
I’m using Zed a lot as well for Golang and a bit for Rust. For Java it is also hard to use and lacking the same polish.
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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
How could LLM's work better without LSP when LSP is something don't interact with?
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.
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...
You're right about SolarWinds though.
This is the best IDE for Java. And it is nowhere near 2000s, it is modern and the best one can use for Java.
Only last year finally got to support JNI development with mixed language debugging, which Eclipse and Netbeans have supported for the last 20 years.
Some of that stuff is supported by big corporations that employ the people that work on those things and have a financial interest in making sure those things continue to exist. As a result, I get to stand on the shoulders of giants. That extends to things like Linux, databases and other middleware, frameworks and libraries, and lots and lots of developer tools.
I pay for plenty of SAAS stuff when I need to or when it adds value. Just not for Intellij.
How enthusiast are most professional to throw money at "smart" tools, hmm?
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Otherwise I like having everything in one place: code, containers, databases, remotes...
https://sourcegit-scm.github.io/ on Linux
Magit OTOH stays much closer to the true git. Although for anything slightly more esoteric I still prefer native git cli.
"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...
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.
I'm having issue on mac, but never had it on Linux after setting inotify limits sufficiently high
This one is even better. Your refusing to tune your OS is like coming to a restaurant with gluten intolerance and expecting to eat anything without getting sick because you paid 30$ for your dish.
Maintain your gut health is your responsibility. Maintaining your OS to be able to run software (paid or free) – likewise. IDEA even displays helpful tips asking you to do so.