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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

How's performance? I've used PyCharm about once a year historically and kept going back to TextMate 2 or (now) VSCode for UI responsiveness.

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Mm, good point. WebStorm performance is good, but IDEA is noticeably slower. I haven't used PyCharm yet, so it's possible performance could be a pain point there. I find myself firing up Webstorm instead of IDEA due to slower IDEA indexing.

FWIW Cursive is a bit sluggish to start, but after it's done indexing it feels like the best Lisp development environment ever made.

I liked PyCharm's feature list but the index-the-world behaviour definitely like it going back to the pre-SSD era. Not a show-stopper for my biggest project but the cost for everything else definitely left me hesitant to switch.

I had the same experience with a Vim plugin called Jedi. It was great, but typing "pdb." would freeze Vim for 5 seconds. IDEs can definitely try to do too much.

Sorry, this may be a silly question, but is it possible for PyCharm (and other IntelliJ IDE products) to define a specific working folder / path for the file index-the-world feature to stay within or does it always permeate through the entire computers hard drives, just in case?

It works similarly to git. You define a project root, and then exclude subdirectory trees as needed. I believe there's a way to add additional directories outside the root if needed.

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