Rider: jetbrain C# IDE

I use Resharper (R#) on a less powerful work machine (i5 8GB) and it works OK, there are times where VS (2012) seems to be horribly slow - and I don't know if that's caused by R# or not. R# adds too much power to VS for me to give it up.

Having said that, I use IntelliJ IDEA both at work and home - and it generally feels faster and more responsive than VS/R#. Rider is based on the IDEA platform.

One thing to note is that VS is kind of a 1-stop shop for a lot of "things" - writing code, database work (especially MSSQL), diagrams, GUI design for both HTML and actual desktop apps, etc. Things you use a mouse for, not a keyboard.

IntelliJ has some of this with plugins, but it's focus is writing code and helping you as a developer to write/refactor/work with that code. I often find people who really think VS is the best IDE to use these other features, whereas I do mainly code and prefer IntelliJ (or even Atom) over VS.

I had to stop using resharper on my work laptop (i7-4610M w/16g ram) because it was so sluggish. I've been trying every EAP build that they release for Rider and so far the performance between it and VS w/resharper is night and day. (On my laptop at least) Rider runs absolutely flawless with all of the resharper functionality built in. I don't know how they managed to have such a difference here.

I use VS2015 with resharper on a parallels vm (12gb, 6 cores i7) as my daily driver only really notice the slow down you mentioned (1/4 speed) on the larger solutions, unfortunately thats when you need the majority of the refactor tools the most.

I've tried a couple of the Rider EAP releases and it's a long way off, I find Visual Studio Code currently offers a better experience on OSX.