a colleague of mine answered the same question with: "jetbrains products reek of java"

which i translated to "less cluttered ui" and "generally more responsive".

JetBrains product has always been fast for me, as I wouldn't run them on a 10-year-old computer with an HDD drive. They've been very configurable, more than other IDEs I've used. An IDE is a host of tools, so the UI can be dense because they can do so much stuff. You invest in your tools, and that can also mean buying a powerful enough computer to do the stuff you want.

i share your feelings and i'm a happy jetbrains customer (and i dont do java!); but i see the point of people not feeling comfortable using them specially when coming from more pared-down experiences. emacs and neovim are also snappier, vscode is marginally snappier, doesn't bother me but it's noticeable.

JB also has some glaring holes, like the inability of easily specifying an env file to load when running projects from the IDE runner (and the plugin to do this was half broken with the 2023 versions)

> the UI can be dense because they can do so much stuff.

Vim can do a lot of stuff, but its UI is very minimal. That's because it recognized that there are already many buttons right under your fingers, so there's no point in putting more of them on the screen.

Vim has the potential to do a lot of stuff. It is extensible to a point that you can build any JetBrains' IDE with it (their main selling point is the code analysis part). But right out of the box, editing is its only strong point.

GUI is more discoverable than terminal software. You open a project with WebStorm, it can already understand it, and you can configure a build process in a few clicks.

The 'New UI' in PyCharm 2023 is pretty nice. Less of an airplane cockpit vibe. Its still a total hog of compute resources but I have an M1 machine and never notice any problems.

For many people, it's because the choices for an IDE are all dog slow, and configuring a few plugins for their editor of choice provides a close-enough experience to strike the balance they are looking for.

So, no, an IDE is not a better choice for everyone who want's "IDE like features". It is for some, but not everyone.

> I've never understood why people and to extend vim to try to make it half of an IDE.

Because vim ships with any *nix machine and provides a consistent experience no matter where you use it.

Vim is the DE part and people add plugins or whatever to enrich the text editing experience with LSPs or other language aware plugins, and the I in IDE is in the form of the integration with the tooling already available on the host.

This[0] might shed some better light on the "why"

[0] https://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/series/unix-as-ide/