IntelliJ IDEA

What hackers pick instead

• JetBrains IDEsLong-time developers praise JetBrains IDEs for deep code intelligence, refactoring, navigation and debugging, but critics cite heavy resource use, buggy recent updates and clumsy AI integration.233recommend
• Microsoft Visual StudioA full Windows IDE praised for its powerful C++ and C# debugger, code navigation and productive WinForms tooling, though many find it slow, bloated and pushy with Copilot.165recommend
• DelphiRecommended for building native Windows desktop apps very quickly with a visual drag-and-drop designer, though critics complain about aggressive licensing and a company that lost its way.126recommend
• XcodeApple's free IDE, praised by long-time users for strong debugging tools and steadily improving AI agent support, though many find it buggy and tied to recent Macs and macOS.100recommend
• JetBrains RiderDevelopers, mostly on .NET, say it is faster and smoother than Visual Studio, especially on Linux and Mac. The most common caveat is subscription-only licensing.68recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 366 comments. Each links to the original.

1. I've had mostly problem-free experiences with intellij (ultimate-only feature I think). One click finds declarations both in business code and buried deep in libraries.

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “A Claude Code and Codex Skill for Deliberate Skill Development”

2. I'd come from the world of IntelliJ IDEA which had all manner of code navigation, inspection, refactoring, and testing functionality built in

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts”

3. Drawing a mindmap of your refactoring plan is barely more than IntelliJ (let alone Claude Code) can already do at the click of a button.

   Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Use the Mikado Method to do safe changes in a complex codebase”

4. had a lot great features like refactoring, extracting part of code as a function, renaming and creating empty classes/boilerplate

   Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “JetBrains reports revenue growth, net financial loss for 2025”

5. Though most of the time built in refactors like 'extract to _' or 'move to' or 'inline' or 'change type signature' are enough.

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Claude Code gets native LSP support”

6. Something like IntelliJ made the very large reference section irrelevant, as you got to see source and Javadocs right there.

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore”

7. Java is the only language that I've found vscode support poor, so I keep buying Idea license exclusively for Java projects.

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Threat Actors Expand Abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code”

8. I noticed a real productivity increase when going from Cider/VSCode to JetBrains/IDEA/IntelliJ for Kotlin code editing

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “A History of IDEs at Google”

9. it's always been a resource hog and always perpetually just beyond the faculties of the typical developer workstation

   Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot”

10. I would still need IDEA (at least Community) to perform Java -> Kotlin migration and smooth Java interoperability.

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Surface Tension of Software”

11. It uses that time to parse the source into an AST and build a search index to provide type-aware symbol search

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good”

12. I haven't found another IDE which is as powerful as IDEA when it comes to debugging a JVM language project.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot”

13. why their tooling can handle "find usages" on an HTML element to find matching querySelector in .js files

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Why building a Rust LSP is hard”

14. only find myself touching things like IntelliJ when I really need to dig into something with a debugger

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Emacs 31 Is Around the Corner: The Changes I'm Daily Driving”

15. have been able to do many types of refactors and class generation that included some of the boilerplate

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “When AI Writes the Software, Who Verifies It?”

16. IntelliJ is vastly superior to any other java IDE but their AI agent implementation sucks pretty hard

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “No More JetBrains Products for Me”

17. I found it easier to enter a debug session within Intellij then 'vibe' and explore the internal apis

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “A History of IDEs at Google”

18. Jumping through a stack of functions across classes and back seems like the most common case to me.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “JetBrains reports revenue growth, net financial loss for 2025”

19. nothing else matches the out of the box experience of IntelliJ, atleast for JVM based languages

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot”

20. Intellij knows my Frob class does not have a static Blurb method, yet will still allow an LLM to generate a code completion of "frob.blurb()"

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “The "confident idiot" problem: Why AI needs hard rules, not vibe checks”

21. the swapping induced by IntelliJ overflowing my system RAM is supposed to reduce the inefficiencies of using too little memory

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Every Byte Matters”

22. IntelliJ-family IDEs will report incomplete search results as complete when they are rebuilding their search indices.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Threat Actors Expand Abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code”

23. their product quality significantly dropped since 2022, as they've cut themselves from their main source of engineers

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot”

24. fails to layout dialogs correctly the first time they're displayed, just like every other Swing application

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Async Rust never left the MVP state”

25. I've wasted insane amounts of time on bugs and on filing detailed bug reports that are never looked at.

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Zed is 1.0”

26. JetBrains have been continuously delivering new features and innovations in their products in ways which make my work and life better and easier.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “25 Years of IntelliJ Idea”

27. I also bothered to learn the standard keybindings of the most popular IDEs of my kind of work (intellij, eclipse, netbeans, vs code).

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “The Productivity Mirage”

28. Still has room for improvements, like finally getting their own incremental compiler instead of reusing the one from Eclipse

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot”

29. Kotlin Multiplaform stuff will be Fleet-first! which they then reversed to actually it'll be IntelliJ/Android Studio first

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “JetBrains cancels Fleet”

30. compare older IDEs like eclipse or idea and try to create layout which fills screen with information important for you.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Why TUIs Are Back”

31. I've never seen it fail to lay out dialogs correctly, windows do have minimum sizes, and I haven't seen any focus bugs.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Async Rust never left the MVP state”

32. this does not apply to PyCharm, GoLand, Rider, RubyMine, or many of their development tooling - only Intellij IDEA

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “The Unified IntelliJ Idea: More Free Features, Better Experience, Smoother Flow”

33. Pricing seems reasonable even though I'm currently generating $0 from my software development so I keep paying.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle”

34. use intellij on full stack apps with cdk, react, sqls and whatnot, multiple open at a time, without any problem

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot”

35. I've been working on decently sized Java/Kotlin codebases (~250k locs) with way less RAM allocated for Intellij

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot”

36. Thing that IntelliJ and even NetBeans have going for them is that they seem like tools for getting work done.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Threat Actors Expand Abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code”

37. The Claude Code integration with IntelliJ (or any Jetbrains IDE for that matter) is the perfect combination.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Graphite is joining Cursor”

38. more holistic approach that IntelliJ has and feels more like a text editor with smarts bolted on than an IDE

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot”

39. I use multiple panes/windows in IDEA all the time, and it also supports opening tabs in new windows/frames.

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good”

40. it has become ClaudeCode-esque of late: sub-agents, skills, tool-calling, hooks…and continues to improve

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “OpenChamber: An Agentic Development Environment”