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Comment by gimboland | Hacker News Reader

You may change your mind if you plug your MBP into an external 4K display and try to use a scaled resolution: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-526 — don't get me wrong, I love PyCharm too for all the reasons spoken about in this thread, but this issue (which has been open for five years now) has made me attempt to jump ship to VSCode for my python work several times. I _do_ always come back to PyCharm... so far...

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This is completely not restricted to IntelliJ/PyCharm.

The MBP i7 is terrible for this, and I get thermal throttling all the time when I use 4k external screens and anything remotely that seems like work.

OK, but (for example) my experience is that I only experience this as a problem with PyCharm — it literally becomes unusable; VSCode (say) is fine.

Depends on the plugin that gets activated. Jest can bring it to its knees.

... because of rendering/scaling/4K? Or just anyway?

What's the reason for using a scaled resolution btw? Can't you just ramp up the font size in the IDE?

It looks like maybe a macOS issue as Windows/Linux don't have the same problem, but there's a port of Java to Apple's proprietary Metal API in progress for some time. It's possible that will fix it.

Yes, as it happens you can in PyCharm; in many other apps I use that's not the case, however. I've got used to running at full 4K but TBH sometimes I worry about eye strain.

I often use a 24" 4k display that I use at 2x and I never had any issue. With other "equivalent" resolutions it may be bad (never tried) but I've heard people complain about lag in that situation (even with a newer MBP and apps other than intellij).

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