Always hard to interpret these complaints when the author won't reveal what hardware they're talking about, other than that it's old.

I think Zed is a great option for someone who is both highly critical of load times and has older hardware. I would not have recommended a JetBrains IDE given this person's requirements and hardware situation.

I use JetBrains IDEs on a daily basis and it's not a problem for me, even on my M1 Apple Silicon machine which is, what, almost 6 years old now?

That said, I'm not hyper-sensitive to things like a loading screen that takes a few seconds. I open the IDE once or twice a day at most and then leave it open. I tested it just now and went from clicking to being in the IDE and editing a file in 3 seconds on a cold start (recently rebooted) on my 6 year old laptop. When I read these anecdotes I don't know if someone has a broken environment (too many plugins installed?), a really old machine, or if they're just so hyper-sensitive that a couple seconds of loading screen seen a few times a day is enough to trigger them.

> the tool is so fricken slow.

How old is "old hardware"? I've had no issues running CLion on a 2020 M1 Macbook Air and a i5-10400 (Linux). These projects are only in the hundreds of thousands of lines of code though.

> The install is gigantic on disk, leading me to avoid it on my older machines where space is limited.

I found that by default toolbox likes to keep old versions of the IDEs available for rollback. I disabled that and reclaimed tens of GB across all the products I use.

I don't use any crazy plugins and I hit one or more of these issues almost every day:

  - Code analysis during git commit taking minutes
  - 10-15 seconds for the as-you-type suggestion box to pop up, I often end up just typing the full variable name myself
  - Typescript taking 10-30 seconds to refresh errors, even with the experimental tsgo rewrite
  - Freezing and displaying the "dump threads" message, weirdly also lagging out my Spotify
  - Easily consuming 10+ GB of memory (how?)

Many of us still use Jetbrains products because we're willing to put up with a little lag for the multitude of really useful features you get, but they need to attack performance seriously or they're going to risk losing folks.

- OS : windows - CPU : i7-1365U - GPU: no idea, probably Intel or a low end Nvidia - RAM: 32 Gb

The time to load (TtL) is defined as the time between I start the program and the IDE has completely loaded (nothing load or spin or whatever). For each test I open the IDE once first in order for potential updates and changes in configuration to apply, then I close.

Pycharm, clean install - no plugins, TtL to empty dashboard: 60s. Ttl to a small python project: 60s

VScode, old install with several plugins : TtL to empty dashboard: 8s. TtL to a small python project: 20s

Zed, clean install - no plugin: TtL to empty page: 2s. TtL to a small python project: 4.4s

I'd really like some context here. Because for some people this is like "My M4 is out of date now the M4 ultra is out" and for others it's "I think computers really took a step back when when we started to talk about Gigahertz and Gigabytes, a 386 is all I need".

Open the whole project I'm in:

  $ zedme

  $ zedme foo.rs

One moment, I'm happily working away in a terminal. One second later, I'm looking at a full-featured editor with all the tooling I want.

That's the performance bar, the expectation. Slower than that and I have to adapt my workflow to the editor, not vice versa, and I've never used an editor so great that I'm willing to tolerate that.

This is the thing that drives me insane. The most annoying part is that they haven't built a proper cross-idea way to diagnose this. How hard is it to just have a UI, or even some text log, that says "I'm reindexing because X, Y, Z have changed" or something?

I like ZGC. And having the IDE grab more RAM immediately on startup than the default. Something like Xms=4g or however it's done.

I cannot understand why Jetbrains keep the VM settings as constrained as they do. It's a big difference.

The thing is, I don't know what I'd use otherwise. I demand an actual IDE, not a text editor that allows me to install a ton of plugins to make it into a half-baked IDE (ie, vim).

Maybe I should actually give VSCode a strong try. I've only used it as a code viewer for anything that's not Python.

2) I am in the same boat with slowness. I've been using PHPStorm for over 10 years and it has always been "slow", but the newest pain point is that I will have claude in a terminal update a file. If the file is open in PHPstorm's viewing pain, it might take 10+ seconds to update the contents: I now always "update from disk" if I want to copy the contents outside of my KVM. It's just absolutely terrible workflow.

3. I have also found all of their AI efforts to not only be poorly executed, but executed in poor taste: it's just IN THE WAY rather than being helpful.

4. I mostly don't appreciate most of their features, generally. My flow is pretty simple. I no longer use most of the features. I just don't need the 8000lb elephant any more.

This on a 64GB ram Ryzen 7 5825U.

So if anyone is out there sitting in a similar position, give it a shot, you can get a better editor experience, whether you build it yourself with emacs, neovim, or use a more curated approach like helix, or zed for that matter. I mix and match Helix now with Claude Code, and it works really well. I don't want a single AI feature in my editor, only navigation, and auto complete. I'll have my AI on the side thank you ;)

Really my biggest thing for jetbrains is the cost, of course my company pays for a license on my main machine but I've been paying for a personal license as well and have been thinking of making the switch to Zed/NeoVim/VSCode etc. for a while just to save a few bucks every month.

Having just made the switch to Kubuntu, I'm going to try Kate as my primary editor for a while. It's missing features, but it sure is snappy.

I've also been having massive problems with their sync- like between IDEs or even upgrading versions, I have to reconfigure all my plugins and settings bimonthly. And their AI assistant is so obnoxious- it is a chore to turn off and it randomly turns itself back on for me, ignoring the fact it kinda sucks.

The speed and reindexing issues are also a big problem. I had to hack my way around Tauri when I was using it a year or so back (not sure if this is still an issue). The tauri_ctx! macro apparently generated a lot of code, and slowed RustRover down to a crawl, where syntax highlighting couldn't keep up- it was unusable. I ended up having to move it to it's own crate.

I stopped paying and stayed in 2024.2, every once in a while I see if there is anything meaningful worth it there... nop

Other than that, I must agree with this article.

Link: https://zed.dev/blog/disable-ai-features

On the dev side, I started with IDEs and debuggers and whatnot, but later in my career they didn't give me enough value, and the time needed to configure them (I remember trying to setup RubyMine debugger.. yuck!).

Nowadays I mostly do vim VSCode and recently Cursor/Antigravity for the AI.

But my theory is that IDEs are going to disappear due to AI based development. Paradigms will be different.

Agreed, but if you use IdeaVim you can:

  :e src/my_new_file.txt

For quick edits I just use Vim, but disabling unused plugins speeds up startup quite a bit.

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> Switching projects has abysmal performance

I reported that bug: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JUNIE-2563/Minor-UX-Slo...

Curious what hardware you’re on. I’m in the same camp with JetBrains products, performance has always been my biggest complaint. Apple M chips made a huge difference though. It’s still not my preference, but at least it’s a lot more usable now. Most of my colleagues run multiple instances daily without issues.

If anyone has something roadmapped to replace CodeWithMe, it's worth bucks.

I've used kdevelop a bit lately, it's ok.

Junie - their coding agent - was also a miss. I've had Rider for almost 10 years currently - but considering dropping it. Tradcoding is basically dead, and a lightweight text editor with tree-sitter has come a long way - and it's good enough to read/micro edit with anyway.

I feel bad for them as it's been such a stable product for decades of excellent development, but the world moves on.

So I also hate jetbrains, give me my shortcut get guys!!

- every new release breaks something

  - the syntax highlight and auto completion engine has glaring bugs when using multiple file splits.  Bugs are open for a decade already.

  - performance is complete dog shit. Typing a characters spins up several cores at 100%. 

  - QA plays the "test the bug on the latest and report back or it doesn't exist" game. 

Sorry but Clion is over.

Many people told us we were crazy to compete with such a mature product as DataGrip before we got started.

It has been fascinating to speak to people who use database apps and to learn about their experiences.

Now, we have many, many customers telling us that they have cancelled their DataGrip/JetBrains sub and have switched to using our product, mainly due to speed but also cost.

Their products are really, really slow.

[1] https://dbpro.app

Reminds me about that time i was working at one of the very large cloud providers. I had to edit a script in a source code repository and somehow the direction was something like "download the correct jetbrains ide, connect it to the internal license server, install the 20 plugins to make it work with the internal source code service, the internal code review service, the internal build service, the internal this and the internal that".

Spent like two days installing half of the shit and losing myself among the infinity of wiki pages explaining how to configure this hyper-dimensional tetris.

Then i gave up and just opened good old gnu emacs on my cloud desktop. Thank god there was an internal emacs user group that had written a few major and minor modes to work with the internal tooling.

I was done setting everything up in like one hour.

I unironically spent two years and a half working in gnu emacs running in a screen session, and it was much more productive than whatever jetbrains stuff they were recommending.

They are doubling down on the state of things now by running "safe and stable" advertising, which doesn't make me feel like they're actually going to improve anything. I probably won't be renewing, either.

How does Root/Ventures, V1.VC, Matchstick, Redpoint, and Sequoia get paid and what does that eventually look like for the people who have adopted Zed?

Does it enshittify? Does it just get bought by somebody else and languish?

I do not understand what is their play but it seems to me like they missed last two years of very rapid and forming progress.

of course an editor like Zed is faster than CLion but it makes little sense to compare the two. People use full blown IDEs like Jetbrains or Visual Studio for their heavier features like debugging and profiling, not because they feel snappy. When I write C++ my workflow has always been to use vim for editing and use VS for debugging.

I've been very happy with Zed, and that was before it had as many features as it does now.

I'm not a daily user of jetbrains product, but please. If there's any engineering/developers, start to use afl/cargo fuzz or whatever your fuzzer is, and spot bottlenecks, issues. I started to write software because I was looking at the quality of the very first softwares that were being fuzzed and it opened me some doors.

Of course without telling: "while upgrading, you will loose functionalities except by buying our new edition"

This fellow isnt switching IDEs, just going to a tiny editor instead. I use JB daily and I despise their quality but they do get things right eventually (eg wayland). Ignore AI and remote development, use wayvnc. Open symlinked projects in a single window. Connect agents via IDE Index MCP (not the official one). Use a sidecar editor for magical autocomplete / niche LSP extensions (mirroring the IDEs config). You cant replace an IDE with an editor…

For C# development Jetbrains Rider is second to none.

The number of static analysis, refactorings, inspections, dynamic analysis, slow code paths hightlights, profiling, etc.

It just cannot be done in neovim no matter how I would like to switch.

For C++ (like the OP’s case) — maybe the situation is different. I’ve heard CLion is a meh.

—

Also Jetbrains IdeaVim plugin is the best vim emulation I’ve seen. Nothing comes close with vim plugins support, vimrc, and what have you.

I tried vim mode in Zed — it’s a joke. Immediately uninstalled and got back to vscode, at least it has some vimrc support for custom bindings.

—

Also I don’t get the start-up argument: just don’t close the app, dummy :-). YMMV of course depending on the language.

—

tldr; there is nothing to replace rider with. Because Rider is an actual IDE with tons of proprietary bells and whistles that actually matter

Then again, my dev machine is a Threadripper with tons of ram. I would probably sing a different song if I needed to work on a macbook air with 16gb of ram.

The problem with new editors is that the initial friction of configuring every shit that annoys you takes too much time. I tried zed, but gimme a break, wtf has time to learn all the peculiarities.

Trying to find the stable point of agentic coding is like trying to catch a falling knife. Will you still need to look at diffs? I for one no longer make any edits, as a policy - I either tell the agent to fix it, or tweak a skill or memory or doc so it doesn't make the same mistake a second time, or configure something adversarial. But does that continue indefinitely?