And IntelliJ

PyCharm’s lack of popularity surprises me. Maybe it’s not good enough at venvs

Oh, it's good at venvs. Lots of flexibility too on whether to use pip, conda, or uv.

IME pycharm’s weakness is not integrating with modern tooling like ruff/pyright - their built in type checker is terrible at catching stuff, and somehow there isnt an easy way to run MyPy, black or isort in it.

If there’s a workflow I’m missing please let me know because I want to love it!

I just checked and I don’t even have the JVM installed on my machine. It seems like Java is dead for consumer applications. Not saying that’s why they aren’t popular but I’m sure it doesn’t help.

IntelliJ IDEs bundle the JVM, so you don't need to install it separately.

Every Java app these days bundles a JVM . It was made easy with jlink like 10 years ago. Only parts of the JVM are included so it’s lightweight.

    > remain unpopular outside of Android Studio

What a strange claim. For enterprise Java, is there is a serious alternative in 2025? And, Rider is slowly eating the lunch of (classic) Visual Studio for C# development. I used it again recently to write an Excel XLL plug-in. I could not believe how far Rider has come in 10 years.

Oh, sure. I've been using IntelliJ since 2003. But compare the number of C# developers and the number of JS developers.

In my current company, only I am using IntelliJ IDEs. Other people have never even tried them, except for Android Studio.