I would love it if they focused on performance improvements and making the editor more lightweight overall. I love WebStorm, but even on my beastly XPS running nothing but it and Chrome, it sometimes hangs doing nothing. I'm starting to investigate other editors such as Atom because of this. I find it hard to believe that a quad core, modern computer can possibly have a hard time running a text editor.

Google a bit for adjusting GC settings in idea - stuff like http://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2006/04/configuring-intellij-... (old, but check the comments). I'm not using it anymore, so can't find what I ended up with, but adjusting the startup options made a huge difference 2 years ago.

I think I also went for one of the experimental/less stable concurrent collectors - didn't find any issues in practice.

+1 I bumped up heap space to min 1g max 2b. Now this beast of a Spring heavy project (day job) doesn't hang IntelliJ ("indexing...").

Seems to me these IDEs could suggest reasonable JVM options after profiling your project.

Or at least put the JVM options in the preferences, so I don't have to dig around the install/distro.

Thanks for that, I will try that out right now.

I have opposite experiences. Compared with other big IDEs IntelliJ gives much more help/features compared to resources used, for me.

My relatively old laptop runs IntelliJ and PyCharm like a dream... Atom runs sluggishly. I ditched Atom quickly.

Also do realize that Atom is not as mature as PyCharm. Don't dismiss Atom so fast. Give it some time and try it again.

Disclaimer: I love PyCharm, and I actually would not replace it with Atom. I believe PyCharm is the best IDE for Python, but Atom has its uses.

Is it a CPU bottleneck (cores being at 100% would be a good sign of this), or memory running low and causing swapfile use (high HDD activity)? Without any further info I'm leaning toward the latter, as you have both a Java application and a browser possibly running lots of JavaScript, and both being GC'd languages means they'll be competing for memory rather aggressively.

I never bothered to check, but I think it's probably memory. Sorry for the delay to reply, I'm on vacations!

Atom uses a lot of resources compared to other text editors. IDEs aren't just text editors though. WebStorm is probably slower than people's experience with IDEA because the languages you use on it don't play to an IDE's strengths.

Agreed, I run on Ubuntu for my main machine and it performs quite badly under that, and the fonts are terrible.

Yes you can patch them using some system wide font fix, but that makes everything else look like garbage.

Have you installed the Oracle JVM? By default Ubuntu uses OpenJDK.

I use Oracle JVM, by the way.

I had that problem with webstorm. You can tweak the gc settings.

Are you using windows?

Ubuntu 14.04. Sorry for the delay, I'm on vacations!

I hope they're going to fix the Scala and Play plugins. Unfortunately they say nothing about it. Sometimes the lag between typing and actually seeing it in Idea is a couple of seconds.. Still better than the last time I tried Scala IDE (eclipse) though.

Yeah, that's definitely an issue. The Scala auto-complete is not very responsive, which makes the whole IDE experience with Scala pretty undesirable, sadly. I've been using IDEA with Java in the last ~2 months and it was perfectly smooth all the time. I guess Scala is a lot more complex as a language than Java, which makes parsing it on the fly much harder.

One thing I noticed about the Kotlin design and design discussions is that "that wouldn't be auto completable fast" comes up quite often. I had never thought about it before but it makes sense that language design choices can impact the speed of an IDE. I am starting to think that it also makes a lot of sense for language designers to have IDE development experience. I wish they'd hurry up and release a stable Kotlin.

It would be pretty sad if code completion efficiency became a reason to compromise on other areas of a language.

Why? They're just tools. Code completion is probably more important than a lot of the rather minor syntax sugar features in many languages.

I don't know how long ago you tried the scala plugin. But I had the same bug when writing strings. What ultimately fixed it was disabling i18n support in the scala plugin preferences. I haven't had a single freeze/stutter since.

I take it you mean the actually "Ii8n for Java" Plugin?

Scala and Play support is already vastly ahead of where it was just 6 months ago, but there's definitely more room for improvement. The overall intelligence of the IDE is still sorely lacking versus what you get for, say, Java. I'd love to see a lot more support for intelligent editing of SBT files, more intuitive ways of finding usages of instances and types, working with implicits, and refactorings that align with Scala's abstractions. It seems like such a powerful language should have an IDE that gives you more ability to access those features.

Also, I find the code style settings to be extremely difficult to tweak, in large part due to poor browsability and also because you can't actually see them applied to the example code next to the settings editor.

I haven't used the play plugin that much, but I've been very happy with the Scala plugin. In fact it's the only reason I switched to intellij. The only annoying bug I've encountered is bogus error notifications in Java code due to the ide ignoring Scala throws annotations on methods that java is calling.

I reported a series of bugs about the Java / Play plugin a couple weeks back. The support guy did some investigation and filed a few internal tickets...so they're working on it.

Agreed. In the meantime, I've switched to Ensime. Takes some getting used to but it's very nice.

Hmmm, I never had such a problem with Scala and Idea. How big are the projects you're working on? Maybe your computer is just slow.

Is this another minor release disguised as a major release in order make old customers renew the licence?

I say this because I did not notice any major improvements between 12 and 13, but still I had to pay for a new licence.

Starting from v13, JetBrains includes a 1-year upgrade on their intellij license. Example: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/choose_edition.jsp?license...

My complaint is they assigned obvious and easy to fix bugs (not improvements ot new features) to next paid release. Thats were they lost me as a paying customer.

If you didn't feel you got anything useful in the new version, why pay for it?

Some of the plugins (which is a big part of choosing IDEA over the sub-products) aren't backwards compatible (I had issues with the golang plugin in 12, but it's fine in the community edition of 13). Right now I've got PyCharm 3.4 (work license), IDEA 12UE (personal license), IDEA 13CE, and Android Studio on my machine to support the various languages I'm using on somewhat regular basis (90+% of my time is spent in python, which is why I don't just use the python plugin for IDEA - the plugins are nice, but the context menus get crazy one you have more than one active at a time)

I hope they will add C#+Xamarin support when their project N arrives. Sell for 30% of Visual Studio price: win for everyone (except MS).

I don't think that's gonna ever happen. That would cannibalize ReSharper for C# sales which are bound to Visual Studio and cause a cool down in the relationship with Microsoft. Sure way to go out of business.

Yes, but Roslyn is going to hurt ReSharper somewhat.

Wouldnt the increased accessibility to the C# language be of benefit to MS?

Maybe, they are thinking differently now.

Wow this is magnitudes slower that 13 CE. What gives? Can I turn off something(plugins?) to make it faster?

If you are experiencing quirks like that, please report them via http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/ since that is the whole purpose of an EAP program. I don't think you will receive support for your specific problem via the tracker, but at least they will be aware that such a condition exists.

If you want help, http://devnet.jetbrains.com/community/idea/ideacommunity will probably be a great place to start. I have found their forums to be responsive and to have a pretty good signal/noise ratio.

You wait a while. It's not final code, it's an early-access preview.

Is there any discussion about IntelliJ supporting multiple open projects at once? Requiring a separate window for each project breaks down when I've got 21 projects open, as I have now in NetBeans.

Not to sound snippy, but how do you define projects in your world, and how do you benefit from having 21 of them open at once? How many do you interact with in a typical day?

That setup is so far removed from my day-to-day experience that I'm genuinely seeking understanding here. At most, I typically have 3 or 4 open "projects" at once, and those would be fairly tightly related (like, a server codebase and a couple of clients for it).

I'm not going to go into my specific needs or project setup, but even with 4 open projects, IntelliJ requires 4 open windows! That's asinine when both NetBeans and Eclipse allow me to decide how many projects I want open within a given IDE window. It's the biggest reason I only use IntelliJ when writing IntelliJ plugins.

Even then, I keep these related codebases as separate modules inside a single project.

Have you looked into setting up your projects as modules? I have dozens of modules in a project with no issues. If the projects are related there are benefits like source code linking too.