71–80 of 87 posts
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 sinc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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?
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 sinc…
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…
I have been paying for JetBrains for years, but, as many have pointed out in this thread, between the performance issues and agentic IDEs like Cursor, it's getting harder and harder to justify. JetBrains, just focus on improving the existing IDEs and naturally embedding access to third party LLM agents in them and you're good to go.
It's crazy that I'm paying for IntellJ yet can't hook up my own LLM to it. Jetbrains wants to be some middleman instead of letting me use my tools. I won't and I can't use your hosted LLMs, period.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Currently LLMs are a rather bad productivity booster for programming, but in the near future, this will change. been hearing this for three years now
I am similarly doubtful of such claims, but just look at various posts on HN where the writers makes claims how much more productive Claude Code (before: Cursor; before that: (GitHub) Copilot) made their programming.
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 sinc…
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.
It used to be that no matter what language you were working with, JetBrains was the answer for the serious poweruser.
Now JetBrains is little more than VSCode with a subscription. They've absolutely ruined the UI, performance keeps getting worse, they're trying really hard to shove their useless AI at you, and when you complain about it, you either get dismissed, deleted, or gaslighted.
JetBrains is actively pushing out their base power users and betting the entire farm on taking a small percentage of VSCode users.
All the old hats like me are canceling subscriptions while new users are piling onto the free versions and are unlikely to convert to paid.
Because again, JetBrains has stripped their programs of any utility or identity and just made a cheap VSCode clone that costs a ridiculous amount of money for no apparent benefit.
I'm really mad about this. JetBrains made IDEs that sparked joy. It was a real tool for real professionals that need to get shit done and not play 40 goddamn questions to find the unlabeled button I'm looking for. They used to get out of your way and stay there. Now I have disembodied text floating in an undifferentiated sea of whitespace and hieroglyphs.
And through all of this, JetBrains insists that I'm wrong for wanting labeled buttons or for not wanting a new UI. A JetBrains employee told me to my face that the new UI had to happen because they must innovate. They did not offer a response when asked about what they've innovated instead of copying from VSCode.
JetBrains put essentially all core development on halt for years and spent millions of dollars on the UI redesign. They brag about how many thousands of bugs they fixed in the new UI, and seem to be unaware that they're bragging that they created several thousand new bugs instead of fixing old ones.
JetBrains has totally lost the plot and are on the fast track to irrelevance.
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 sinc…
> 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 offl…
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
Fleet started as our attempt to explore a new generation of JetBrains IDEs, developed in parallel with those based on the IntelliJ Platform. Over time, we learned that having two general-purpose IDE families created confusion and diluted our focus. Rebuilding the full capabilities of IntelliJ-based IDEs inside Fleet did not create enough value, and positioning Fleet as yet another editor did not justify maintaining t…
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 sinc…
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 JetB…
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.