The article now has an update that confirms your reading:

I can see that by using an abridged and edited version of my analysis of the data for this blog post that I’ve unintentionally spread confusion. I’d like to clarify the intention behind my comments on developers and IDEs. For me, if developers don’t understand what IntelliJ IDEA gives them as a fully-featured IDE, that’s a failure on my part, since it has been my job for six years to educate developers on what an IDE (specifically IntelliJ IDEA) can do for you. I feel very strongly that one should never blame users, or prospective users, for failing to understand a product.

My personal viewpoint on IDEs for Java developers comes from having been a Java developer for 20+ years, working on production Java projects large and small. I can’t imagine trying to create a complex enterprise application without the considerable help you get from an IDE like IntelliJ IDEA. I have also seen lots of developers using VSCode and I completely see the use cases that code editors cover well. There’s always room for more than one tool in your toolkit, and understanding what a tool does well helps us pick the right one for the right job.

I used IntelliJ for almost two years, JS and Java. I hope I never have to use it again. It's laggy, clunky and with a less than intuitive UI. Yes, it is powerful but it doesn't weigh up for its shortcomings.

Try Eclipse for a while. You'll definitely want to get IntelliJ back.

I never did understand all the Eclipse hate, especially when compared to IntelliJ. I use both regularly and the only thing Eclipse is missing for me is a proper searchable command pallete. Code navigation, refactoring, debugging and version control all work great, it's much faster and resource-friendly than IntelliJ and many things are a lot more straight forward (like the lack of IntelliJ's confusing changesets and non-native file pickers).

This depends on your use case.

I work on an enterprise project with 100+ gradle projects and a pile of targets for docker containers, kubernetes deployments, DB schemas, Redis stuff, etc..

Eclipse is incredibly slow in this use case compared to IntelliJ and would frequently gobble 10GB of Ram. I switched from Eclipse to IntelliJ earlier this year after years on this project and IntelliJ is amazingly better.

But if you're using some different build system and a different type of project configuration maybe it's the other way around..

I think the thing with these

The last project I used Eclipse on consisted of like 50 different maven modules. Plus we were also using a mix of Java and Scala code. The Scala plugin we were using seemed to make everything run very, very slowly. At times, it couldn't even keep up with my typing.

This was back in 2011 though. Obviously things have changed.

The difference between Eclipse and IntelliJ was like night-and-day, however, in terms of performance.

I used Eclipse a long time ago and it had horrible performance. But IntelliJ quality had been really bad in recent years. Minor updates causing major performance regression, taking massive CPU when nothing is being worked on. It was way more stable product in earlier versions.

Perhaps Eclipse has improved. The last time I personally used it for a project was back in 2011. It was slow, laggy, and I found the UI to be less friendly than IntelliJ. Obviously some of that is personal preference.

Neither did I. I was introduced to Eclipse before I got my first job and today, 9 years later it still gets the job done. I briefly use IntelliJ IDEA CE only for one static analysis plugin that works better in IDEA, most code editing is in Eclipse.

I don't love eclipse, not a person to get too attached to an IDE, but it is an incredible piece of open source software. It works.

Also too much effort in rewiring keyboard shortcuts that have made their way to my muscle memory. So eclipse it is.

CTRL+3 to bring up the command pallette. Cheers!

Thanks!! I opened it once by accident and haven't managed to find it again (it's not called "command pallete" so I couldn't find anything in the docs). I suck at remembering keyboard shortcuts, so this is going to be a significant productivity boost!

Haha, yup no problem. I saw someone do it once in a youtube video and was like WTH was even that!!?

Funny InteliJ made me love Eclipse again, and other than Android Studio, I don't plan to touch anything made by JetBrains unless required to do so due to work contracts.

I do all my coding in VS Code now (JS, Elixir and sometimes even Java).

I recently used VS Code for a personal project involving embedded C++ development. I used the PlatformIO extension. It was nice! I will definitely try it for other projects in the future.

Being less worse is not enough to win users back.

I haven't had this experience - but I do have a relatively powerful PC (16gb ram, SSD, Ryzen 3600). IntelliJ has always been really responsive for me, even on large projects.

In my experience helping others get set up, slow JetBrains tools are usually an AV problem, or a (shudder) spinning rust problem. It seems like the developers agree, given that new versions will offer to setup AV exceptions for you automatically.

Well, seems heavy handed either way to give vscode such attention when vscode was only 4% of respondants. Seems reasonable that you wouldn't want a full fledged IDE in certain cases. For example, a small simple project, or if you're mainly a frontend dev who just needs to add a small API

It would make much less sense to wait until the cool, free tool was more popular before reacting to it, no? They're not worried about eclipse, it's not very well liked. VS Code by comparison has a lot of shine on it.

I feel like it's on the product to make those benefits apparent and easy to use. They're selling me (the user) not the other way around. The message comes off very privileged IMO.