I’ve always found Jetbrains stuff really laggy, even when I tried Clion on my current maxed out 16” MBP, to be honest it’s one of the things that has always put me off their software. The text entry might not be laggy but the general UI has that “laggy Java” (sorry, I know it’s not a Java fault but I just associate it with Java GUI apps!) feel. Personally I find VS Code much more responsive on the whole.

I've been a software developer since the 1990s. I know how Vi(m) feels and I much prefer the affordances offered by VS.Code.

Ironically Jetbrains IDEs are Java, using Java Swing for the UI[1]! This is even less native than VS.Code where at least native widgets are used.

I guess this shows how much our impressions are formed by expectations!

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/12311981/280795

Swing is definitely not "less native" than Electron. The entire window is a web view in Electron apps. I believe Java Swing was even an officially supported UI toolkit on the Mac a long time ago.

Not in the way Cocoa is, but it had a PLAF coming from Apple at the time.

The menus in Swing aren't native but are in Electron.

Maybe Electron supports native menus, but VS Code certainly doesn't use them, at least on Windows and Linux.

Simple experimental proof: resize the window to be very small, and open a menu. The menu can't go outside the bounds of the window.

What menus?

>"I even find the jetbrains IDEs kinda laggy."

On my laptop (6 core 3,9GHz 32GB RAM and NVME) VS Code is fast and responsive, still wastes lots of RAM though. Jetbrains tools meanwhile were way more laggy on the same setup.