Those things are often huge, slow, and take a long time to learn—not all sunshine and roses. When the control panel has search you know you're in one. All a tradeoff of course.
But is the alternative really all that better? I love vim, but without a bunch of plugins it's fairly rough to use. VSCode seems the same. So to me it looks like you're trading one complexity (learning about your tool) for another (having to search left and right for the right plugins, see how they work, etc).
Software dev is not my day job, although I do it often enough to have a PyCharm license. I've purchased that because working with Django just works. It knows how to refactor, it understands the meanings of strings in configurations, it can run a local editor with local analysis / completion / etc but do the actual code running / debugging on a remote machine. All this out of the box and very easily set up. Can VSCode do this? I don't know, maybe. But I know that it doesn't have python support out of the box. So instead of having to search through the settings of PyCharm (which, to me, have fairly sane defaults) I have to search through the plugins of VSCode.
I'm also trying Rust a bit. There's a JetBrains plugin for it, it just works. It was fairly bare bones, now it's getting smarter and smarter with respect to refactoring, etc. Last I looked in VS Code, there were multiple rust plugins. Which should I pick? I get that choice is good, don't get me wrong. My point is that using a "simple" editor isn't all that simple either. It's always a trade off of sorts.
Now, if your point is that all you need is vim with a nice color scheme, I understand that, too. And in that case, you've got a point. But I guess that, as GP said, if there are tools available that are there to help you, some people like using them.
Jetbrains IDE's definitely aren't slow. You need to change the default memory heap sizes.
Same codebase loaded up in Webstorm vs VS Code and I can't see any difference.
Webstorm took about 10-20 seconds to index it but their implementation of the AST is unbelievable. So much more powerful than VS Code. I get code completion in way more places than VS Code and even when they both provide options Webstorm takes the local context into account and much more accurate than VS Code. Refactoring is breeze.
There is no comparison. I happily pay the initial load up time in the morning for smoother ride for the rest of the day.
Huge but not really slow. They automate a lot of common tasks, super fast searches/navigation, refactoring etc. Code analysis is just there. Often my fellow non-IDE users struggle to find the piece of code when we're chatting whereas for me navigating or finding things anywhere in a really large code base is pretty much instant. I stopped pointing it out unless it's a good friend I just want to rib a little.
Most non-IDE users I meet IRL don't take the time to beef up their tool and actually learn how to properly use it. There are also those who flat out refuse to install any plugins, for example, plugins that could make searching large codebases very fast. I don't understand these people, but to each their own! <3
Of course, the whole reason many people chose an editor over an IDE is because they don't want to learn an IDE so, not much you can do there. I've worked with plenty of people who use an IDE and barely using any of its features.
I've never used ripgrep... Does it do offline indexing? because that's what my IDE does and why search is instant. Tools that actually have to go and search everything will never be as fast. Obviously that sort of functionality can exist outside an IDE... And functionality can be added via plugins to any editor...
Not yet. But offline indexing isn't going to matter much until the amount of code you need to search is many GBs and/or doesn't fit in your page cache.
That was essentially what I was getting at :) ...the difference being those who have these wired up into their text editors vs those who have to context switch between editor and terminal.
I haven't found Jetbrains IDEs to be slow in my personal experience. Assuming a beefy CPU and enough memory, I've found Intellij to be really zippy - instantly switching between files in large projects, no lag during text editing etc.
I can understand why you have this idea though - most other IDEs I have used have been noticeably sluggish compared to more lightweight editors even on high end hardware.
It's hard to imagine the slowness isn't outweighed by the speed gains from Intellisense and automatic refactoring tools.
with Webstorm / IntelliJ you can write first using placeholder variable names in a single file. One click to rename the variable and all references throughout the app. Drag the file to a different folder and imports are fixed everywhere. Want to move a single function to a different file? One click or keyboard shortcut and you're there.
