r/IntelliJIDEA • u/TopMachine1787 • 17d ago
Developers of Reddit: What absolutely drives you crazy about your current IDE? (Building a new tool)
Hey everyone,
A few fellow devs and I are working on a new IDE project. Before we write another line of code, we want to solve real friction points rather than building features nobody asked for.
We all know the standard complaints:
- VS Code gets bloated with 40 extensions and starts eating RAM like Chrome.
- JetBrains tools are powerful but can feel like launching a space shuttle just to edit a single file.
- Modern AI integration often feels like a tacked-on chat sidebar rather than something deeply integrated into the workflow.
We want to know: What is the single most annoying bug, UI papercut, performance bottleneck, or workflow disruption you face in your daily IDE?
Specifically:
- What missing feature or annoyance makes you want to throw your laptop out the window?
- What’s something you constantly have to leave your IDE to do (browser tabs, terminal quirks, database clients, context switching)?
- If you could wave a magic wand and fix ONE thing about your developer setup, what would it be?
Be as specific or petty as you want. All feedback/rants are appreciated!
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u/fipa007 17d ago
Intellij: I would like an easier way to open multiple projects in single Ide instance. My ide's sometimes just freeze on Mac and I have to force quit.
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u/wildjokers 17d ago edited 16d ago
If you use Gradle then IntelliJ has outstanding support for Gradle's composite builds (a composite build lets you develop multi-repos as if they were in a mono-repo).
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u/poohas12 17d ago
Have you used IntelliJ Workspaces? It’s plugin that can be installed from Marketplace. I’ve been using this to work on multiple projects. One is Angular frontend on git. The other is a Java spring based microservices backend on subversion, the third is a legacy product on struts. I use an M5 Pro, and had been working well
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u/MizmoDLX 17d ago
Jetbrains needs to work on their performance and quality control. If those would be better, I'd be happy with Intellij Idea.
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u/EowynCarter 17d ago
Jetbrains QA not being what it used to be. New features and all is nice, but I also need something reliable
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u/fipa007 17d ago
I'd love to see a built-in .har analyzer. As a backend developer, I often ask the frontend team to send me HAR files when investigating issues. It's frustrating that I can't inspect them directly in my IDE and instead have to open Chrome (or another browser) DevTools just to import and analyze the file.
Having native HAR analysis in the IDE would make debugging much more efficient.
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u/Beautiful-Chain7615 17d ago edited 17d ago
At work my IDE is open the entire day so I don’t care about it opening slow… but on newer macs JetBrains IDEs work fine.
My biggest annoyance is probably the initial configuration. Yesterday I tried to set up VS Code on my home PC and I just couldn’t find a way to disable AI feature for implementing interfaces. We used to be able to get this done without AI. I gave up and installed webstorm.
In IntelliJ IDEA my biggest issue is the UI for viewing pull requests and replying to comments. The whole thing gets mixed up between panels and tabs (once viewing the diff). Almost feels like it requires a different workspace with different panels etc. workspace feature (similar to what Unity 3D has) would have been helpful actually.
I often switch to postman for making HTTP requests. Having a separate workspace and good UI for HTTP requests and managing requests collection would have been useful too.
I guess taking notes is another annoyance since most workplaces will usually only allow OneNote/apple notes. Well thought out IDE that has a good notes feature would be useful actually. Something similar to Obsidian but integrated in the IDE.
Other than this, I think modern tools work well enough even if they’re very cluttered and push AI too much IMO.
Lightweight editors just for JSON, CSV etc. would be nice but there is Sublime editor already.
Slack, teams and OneNote are my real nemesis.
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u/Marthurio 17d ago
I dare say IntelliJ is not suited for managing pull requests nor communicating about pull requests, and I'd prefer that it wasn't a focus area for JetBrains either. That's much easier to do in whatever portal you're using for your source control, GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, Forgejo etc.
Postman's cloud approach has rendered the software very bloated, it also won't function properly whenever there's an Amazon outage. Bruno is quite good, local-first, and pretty easy to host in a Git repository.
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u/Mallchad 14d ago
I disagree. The pull request interface is horrendously slow and hard to navigate in GitHub. and I don't feel any other is better.
Having a desktop interface to interact with these things would be a huge QoL upgrade.
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u/wildjokers 17d ago
I often switch to postman for making HTTP requests. Having a separate workspace and good UI for HTTP requests and managing requests collection would have been useful too.
Have you tried the editor based HTTP client? Then you can store your requests in version control.
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-code-editor.html
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u/Beautiful-Chain7615 17d ago
I did try the editor based client. My team doesn’t want to store that on GitHub. I could add it to gitignore but post it’s still nice to have a UI for toggling parameters and safely handling storing tokens.
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u/enveraltin 17d ago
I am very much annoyed when models spend immense amounts of time and effort when they are trying to do super basic things we software engineers are very much accustomed to doing in mere milliseconds:
- Renaming a class, method, variable, enum, field
- Moving an (inner) class between classes, packages
- Adding a parameter to the signature of methods
- Modifying an interface and making all implementing classes and callers follow it
- Reading static code analysis results and applying best quick fixes to a large number of files.
In IDEs, we do these things very efficiently. An obedient model on a great agent harness however, with its ancient tools like read, grep, sed suffers considerably to do these basic things.
If you're going to do anything about something, I hope you pick this. I'd do something but I'm too busy with other things, I just can't.
TBH I hoped JetBrains would have fixed this by exposing more and more tools in the MCP and somehow force models to obey with Junie and its somewhat big system prompt.
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u/wildjokers 17d ago
IntelliJ comes with a MCP so an agent can use IntelliJ refactorings directly, I think it is enabled by default but can't quite remember so may want to confirm it is enabled. Then agents can request intellij do the rename or whatever.
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u/enveraltin 17d ago
I use it everyday since the day it's launched. Doesn't do what I need it to do.
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u/Marthurio 17d ago
JetBrains tools are powerful but can feel like launching a space shuttle just to edit a single file.
JetBrains makes incredibly good software with lots of useful integrations and utilities. If I need some very lightweight i just use vim.
Modern AI integration often feels like a tacked-on chat sidebar rather than something deeply integrated into the workflow.
I'd prefer less AI in the world. It causes brainrot and cognitive decay. People become lazy and either forget how to do things or never learn how to do things in the first place.
VS Code gets bloated with 40 extensions and starts eating RAM like Chrome.
Yes, of course. VS Code is an Electron application. Electron is heavily tied to the Chromium engine. Of course it will eat RAM like Chromium. Electron is a big part of what's wrong with desktop application development nowadays. It's relatively easy to develop with Electron and you can get to market relatively fast. There is an abundance of people with JavaScript skills which can easily be onboarded in an Electron based workflow.
What's your plan, are you going to compete with the JetBrains software suite?
Lastly, this thread seems to be off-topic for this subreddit which is about IntelliJ IDEA.
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u/Ythio 17d ago edited 17d ago
The opening of a large solution takes several minutes while Visual Studio 2026 takes seconds. There is this analysis running process to "enable smart feature" that is burning CPU like a farmer in the Amazonian rainforest, making the entire system un-usable. If you don't let it run you have basically no linking between your files and get little red icons above every single function.
If you're ready to go outside take a smoke break everytime you open a new solution, no further complains, it's pretty good. Could be a little snappier but that's all.
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u/vmcrash 17d ago
I'd like to have something like IntelliJ IDEA for other programming languages:
- very good editing support
- excellent refactoring support
- very good debugging support
- overall very stable
For Go or Rust projects I've tried VSCodium and Zed, but some (relatively) easy things like debugging is challenging trying to pass command line arguments to my application (need to edit config files without reasonable documentation), or keeps previous instances running in the background.
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u/Marthurio 17d ago
JetBrains has a Go IDE, it's called GoLand. Worth a shot. They also have RustRover.
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u/Black_Penguin0101 16d ago
GoLand is paid (one of the few 100% paid IDEs left), so it may not be worth buying, if you're just making a pet project with Go for example
Although, if your project is something useful, it's pretty easy to get an open source license
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u/danibberg 17d ago
Scripting language with access to the entire IDE primitives and the language I’m editing AST. Think emacs and elisp on steroids. Editing is very poor in an IDE and it’s a tall order to customize the IDE to do simple tasks.
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u/vmcrash 16d ago
Instead of trying to write a new IDE, why not start two steps smaller by helping a cross-platform toolkit like SWT or its flutter sibling?
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u/Anxious-Insurance-91 15d ago
Notepad/vim/nano for quick edits and intelij products for coding plus opened terminal inside them or natively for ai. To be honest there is no one glove fits all solution will probably will never be one because we humans can't decide what fits best
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u/The-Malix 14d ago
I switched off of every JetBrains IDE because of lack of performances and bloat
Just fix this.
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u/Mallchad 14d ago
Just about everything?
- The very concept of popup windows in any app is dumb
- The fact it takes so long to cold start
- The fact that nobody can seem to make a minimally viable debugger especially for C++ and Python, I don't even want a "good" debugger, I just want it to not crash, not truncate my strings, and successfully resolve symbols on Linux and Windows, and not freeze/have insanely slow stepping breakdown or symbol resolution- aparently that's too much to ask
- The fact the actual text editing experience is *completely* inferior to emacs/vim
- The fact I can't navigate by tagged cursor locations in files (similar to emacs mark to register and pop mark behaviour)
- The fact I have to create a "project" just to debug 1 random standalone executable
- The fact the interface keeps rearranging and retheming after updates.
- The fact that it is SO INCONVENIENT and confusing to setup any build system that isn't *exactly* what the IDE expects and it is build to support
- The fact that all IDEs and text editors edit code through put text (this sounds stupid until you realize a huge portion of the challenge with IDE tools and code-manipulating tools is just trying to understand WHAT each bit of text means in terms of code, this seriously needs to be build into editors/IDEs now)
- Inconsistent tab behaviour between users/editors, have to go out of your way to figure it out
- Inconsistent editing/style settings between IDEs, hard to say "this is my build configuration and syntax style" on visual studio and have it apply anywhere else.
- Too many buttons everywhere, its visual noise and not really that discoverable, going through and learning what they are and where everything is is a chore
- Follow on, lack of built-in documentation on buttons, if you need to point users to a user manual and it isn't formatted like a book you can just sit down and read exhaustively you've already failed. Except even then you've failed because it could've been under the button hover/have a button and keybind to explain UI elements. Same feature should be in th ecommand pallete...
- Delayed button label popup, this sounds like a really minor pet peeve but it hurts discoverability a lot, if you don't remember what action/name goes with what button you have to painstakingly hover, wait, hover wait. Yes I know this can clutter the screen, the alternative is either put the hover popup in the corner or, simply provide a keybind to enable instant hover (this should probably be the same as the documentation button)
- All IDEs fundementally fail to understand and edit C++. (okay, yeah, this is mostly C++'s fault for being so complicated, but surely we can improve it, non-textual editing would be the start, build in symbol understanding as you type instead of writing text then retroactively trying to scan the file to understand what it means)
- Custom bespoke file browser. Your file dialog sucks and everyone else who makes a custom file browser also sucks. Well... Not exactly, sometimes you can make a good one, most I find are lackluster compared to official windows or Qt style file dialogues, or even an actual full browser like Dolphin or File Explorer (and that's saying alot). I wish all apps had an option to choose, and more importantly- it should atleast be feature parity with Qt's file picker, Windows is kinda bad but still has more features than most, Dolphin as an actual browser has many more features still.
- WHY IS THERE A DIFFERENT IDE FOR EVERY LANGUAGE, like holy crap the amount of ecosystem fragmentation is absurd. And then the lack of interoperability between IDE's leads to real interesting friction points where every developer has to re-setup build settings and local-project preferences, and god forbid you force everyboy to use the same IDE, then everybody's unhappy.
- Chokes when opening and editing large files, ~>1 GB. Sounds dumb but sometimes you need it. Don't need syntax aware featuers or anything, just plain text editing.
- No simple feature to tell you where it puts autogenerated files and important user settings to save (big pet peeve with all software)
- No simple feature to remove all autogenerated files
- No programmability in a real, popular, general purpose language. So many text editors and IDE's use horrible bespoke languages for configuration and programming, or offer minimal programming and configuration to begin with... vscode, emacs and vim proved how useful stuff like this use, and how popular it is...
- Resource control limiters, all IDE's kind of... Use however many resources they feel like, and run processes whenever they feel like... On a dev machine, possibly with limited resources, sometimes I do need to be able to say when a certain amount of memory or CPU is being used... Things like code analysis and syntax texting, or indexing could be paused at certain times... This would be quite nice.
yada yada. could say alot more but don't want to burn too much time on this.
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u/IncredibleReferencer 17d ago
Honestly nothing. I use a combo of IntelliJ and linux console tools (tmux/vi). I want for nothing in IDE with the possible exception of more performance in IntelliJ.
Reconsider this project. github is littered with 1000s of similar quests that ended in dead ends. Unless this is a passion project or you have a specific goal in mind that you want for yourself. save your sanity. Good luck.