That's because IntelliJ is creating an (I think) inverted index and dependency graph of your project for code completion/Intellisense and it uses multiple CPU cores to do this as fast as possible.

VSC won't do this to the same extent.

Inverted indexes are slow to create, but fast to query.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_index:

There are two main variants of inverted indexes: A record-level inverted index (or inverted file index or just inverted file) contains a list of references to documents for each word. A word-level inverted index (or full inverted index or inverted list) additionally contains the positions of each word within a document.

TL;DR, for every (key)word, list its file and position. A smart IDE implementation would also need to take file rename and move into account, and translate byte positions to line numbers for quick jump-to-file.

VSC != VS

I'm sure VS chugs power like IntelliJ too

> VSC != VS

Yes, but VSCode offers a lot of the functionality for a lot of the programming languages/frameworks OP mentioned he uses IntelliJ for. HTML, JS, CSS, Vue, Node, Python are all perfectly useable in VSCode. For stuff like Java and maybe SQL the full version of Visual Studio would be a fair comparison since VSCode's options for that aren't that amazing (imho).

I think it depends on the environment as to usablity: eg. on my home laptop, VSC is great; but on my locked-down corporate laptop everything is a slog library and extension-wise - Pycharm just works.

That's obviously a process issue to an extent, but there is only so much time I want to spend messing about with this stuff, and if an IDE doesn't have me fighting admin rights every minute, I'll go with that one.

I used Visual Studio extensively for Python development and occasional debugging of C#, it never once asked for admin privileges.

Wouldn't be surprised if there are issues with older versions though like VS2010 or before.

VSCode, not VS - I used the user version, which didn't require admin privileges but as soon as I started trying to install libraries (e.g. Pandas etc), no dice. Some environments may vary - but like I said, time is limited, no issues with Pycharm.

that was the primary driver to me moving full time into a linux VM for work. The corporate crap and antivirus made my overpowered laptop really slow.

I then moved to booting with an external Samsung T5 SSD drive straight into Linux and running Windows in VMs.

I still need the primary Windows for when I need to join the domain.

Similarly, it's a pain because I found IntelliJ was far better at auto-completing modules across a javascript mono-repo, but the performance was bad that I've switched to VSC despite it generally being worse experience