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Comment by domano | Hacker News Reader

Last week i cancelled my Jetbrains sub after a decade of daily driving it. I just cant take the performance issues anymore. Across 5 different machines all kinds of actions would just take ages and it got worse every year.

Moving to Apple Silicon made it bearable for a few months but somehow Jetbrains manages to get slow even on a M3 Max with 36GB RAM.

Ive been fiddling with configs for years, i tried everything since i was a Jetbrains diehard.

Instead of trying to catch up to other AI editor they should get back to their core and make it possible to use Jetbrains on medium sized Monorepos with multiple languages.

I was hyped when i heard they would release a standalone git product, but then they scrapped it!

In the end i was only dependent on it for debugging and my usual git workflow.

I now switched to zed and gitkraken, i will figure out a new debugging workflow, ill never wait 5 minutes for a simple search action again

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With Claude Code + Zed I might be cancelling mine as well.

I thought with Kotlin they'd invest a ton of energy into Kotlin Native in order to produce fully native IDEs that can squeeze out drastically more performance, but its been over a decade of nothing happening with Kotlin that's worthwhile (despite it having had so much potential, and being a literal key language for Android ???) so I'm really kind of over JetBrains, the only thing I'll miss is DataGrip since Zed is a code editor not a DB editor. Fleet was a good idea, but poorly done, the UI was weird as hell, and it did not feel like it was as snappy as something like Zed or Sublime.

To me it felt like they were trying to be the next Borland, with Kotlin as their Delphi, except the only reason Kotlin matters is Android.

As proven by their own survey, Kotlin is not taking over the JVM world as many assert,

https://devecosystem-2025.jetbrains.com/tools-and-trends

Java 33%, Kotlin 8% as the primary programming language among all existing ones, surveys that focus only on the JVM ecosystem show even smaller percentage for Kotlin.

I also cancelled my All Products subscription a while ago. I have been an IntelliJ user since the early 2000s and gave up after in 2025, it would still forget how a Maven project with some generated files should be built, with everything turning to a sea of red until you reimported the project and redid all your settings again. Job #1.

There was always a regression like this in every new build, along with the performance issues. Also switched to Zed + Claude Code/Codex.

I will miss the debugger (a little bit).

Never ran into this. This seems odd, I use the 2025 build and it works just fine for me. With maven and gradle.

Same. I gave up on Jetbrains and switched to VSCode a few months back after using Jetbrains for over 20 years. Over the years I've done Java, C# and lately mostly Python, and it was PyCharm that made me finally throw in the towel. I felt bad about it. I'm worried that VSCode seems to be taking over everything, but I just couldn't let the tool get in my way anymore. I don't know what's going on at Jetbrains but I hope they can turn it around.

> Last week i cancelled my Jetbrains sub after a decade of daily driving it.

I’ve been paying for a personal license for about 20 years and I’ve been thinking of dropping it. I don’t use it much, but I wanted access to something that I could use offline. I’m not sure that’s possible at this point, so the main appeal is kind of gone for me.

I frequently choose “lesser” tools if it means I’m guaranteed they’ll run offline. I’ve always wanted to have a dev container with all the tools needed to develop 100% offline if needed. Licensing makes that almost impossible and Jetbrains doesn’t look like they have any solutions that work great for 100% offline development anymore.

I might check out Zed this week. I’ve never heard of it. If anyone has some great resources for 100% offline development, I’d love to see them. My subscriptions are getting out of hand and this may be the year for me to trim the fat.

Zed is amazing. It has AI features but it was still amazing before them

The pivot to AI is concerning but the technology is solid and most importantly, it is open source.

I'm kind of mad that JetBrains wouldn't open source Fleet even after EOL, and going as far as taking down the download (something annoying for people that care about software preservation - I hope archive.org has a copy). I can't support a company like this

The nice thing is that they have a single option Disable all AI that does just that. It's refreshing.

(I do use Zed with agents, because it's really good/helpful.)

What kind of offline degradation are you thinking of?

Other than the case you mention (paid service asking for license check) I can’t think of any limitation. Vs code, neovim, zed, eMacs, they should all work. Obviously if you need to clone a repo or download dependencies you need a connection but other than that…

Yeah that should work, you can remove all the AI stuff with a single setting and the rest should be fine.

I canceled my 10+ year all products pack because I have to remove the "AI assistant" from my sidebar every three days.

Also the CEO bragging about the incredible adoption numbers for their "opt-in only" and "not default" UI redesign. Which is a bald-faced lie. It was opt-in for a year or two, and was the opt-out default for years after that. Now there's no option.

I use it for Java. I have never used anything else and never had any performance issues on my 16GB MacBook Air.

If its Webstorm maybe its because of automatic refresh capability ? I've had perf issues with VSCode as well with autobuild enabled. Autocomplete would grind to a halt.

It’s something to do with the TypeScript engine, it must be. I can also run IntelliJ fine with a huge Java project a but it’s TypeScript projects that grind it to a halt. It’s unusable on my work PC but the performance is still poor on my home PC. It’s been a steady decline since 2023

I know what I'm about to write is a meme, however: I stopped having any performance issue after switching to GNU Emacs for my code editing. Granted, as an infrastructure guy I the codebases I work with aren't always super large.

However, it's been crazy fast since always. Lately the lisp engine also got compilation to native code, so it's even faster. I occasionally get a slow down when I open a new project and emacs has to wait for the language server to boot.

> I was hyped when i heard they would release a standalone git product, but then they scrapped it!

Magit is cool :P

Also, emacs is free and runs pretty much everywhere. Truly worth learning.

If you're accustomed to vi modes, Doom Emacs is very approachable. LLMs are also surprisingly good with Emacs Lisp, and the official docs and discoverability of Emacs are excellent, so it's pretty easy to get oriented and achieve the configurations you want even if you're not particularly a Lisp fan.

Whatever starter kit you choose, I recommend giving one a go. The experience is really good these days.

I actually got accustomed to vanilla emacs and I am quite satisfied with that choice.

As a sysadmin that has to often jump from machine to machine it’s nice to be able to install whatever emacs release the os vendor ships and be productive

I'm currently exploring vanilla Emacs through the book _Mastering Emacs_ as well. :D

The last 3-4 releases have really enriched vanilla Emacs (LSP support, tree sitter support, project.el). Emacs adds default packages somewhat conservatively but it seems like everything that gets included by default ends up with very solid integration/support with other packages

> As a sysadmin that has to often jump from machine to machine it’s nice to be able to install whatever emacs release the os vendor ships and be productive

Quite true, although TRAMP gives Emacs users another good alternative to "bringing the config along"!

> As a sysadmin

I think it's also fair for operators to install the tools they use/like the most on the systems they administer. If a more recent Emacs release makes you happier, why not use Guix to include a portable copy of the latest release on all your servers?

I have 48GB RAM on my M4 laptop and get tons of freezing. I had to set the memory heap size to 64GB to reduce it, and I still have to force close once per day

Really? I'm daily driving JetBrains IDEs on Apple M3 and don't recognize any if this. Just give it a bunch of extra heap memory (eg 4g instead if 1gb) and it's fast!

I have given it up to 30GB of heap and i tried many different GC configs, i even ran it and my project on ramdisk.

The issue is related to using a monorepo with lots of code in different languages - openening single folders is fine. Ut i want to be able to work on dozens of services in a single window, all other editors manage just fine

I have a similar problem, large monorepo, things have become really bad lately to the point that the cursor is unresponsive. The only workaround I have found is opening each folder of the monorepo in its own IDE instance

Feel this so hard. The opposite is also true where you have a micro-service architecture and cursor faceplants in workspaces with multiple repos. We ended up building cortex.build partly because of this exact pain. Our context engine builds a git-aware dependency/provenance graph so it can stay local and only pull the relevant slice across a massive repo or dozens of smaller ones.

> but somehow Jetbrains manages to get slow even on a M3 Max with 36GB RAM.

Really? That surprises me, given that I don't have any performance issues at all on my first gen dell xps 13.

Which specific products do you use? I use mostly intellij ultimate, but I have been playing around a bit with the community edition of Rover lately too. They're both silky smooth on my nearly 13 years old ultra portable.

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