> But what do you actually get with IntelliJ? A massive, monolithic Java application that frequently hogs 8GB+ of RAM, locks up your system while “indexing pre-built binaries,” and forces you into a closed proprietary ecosystem.
This is just exaggeration. I use IntelliJIDEA everyday (on mac) with multiple projects open and tbh they have optimized the IDE a lot to make it faster. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's getting better. Also it's not closed source. The core of the IDE is open source (https://github.com/jetbrains/intellij-community) and for some specific framework support (e.g. Spring) are available on Ultimate.
> IntelliJ (actually Android Studio based on IntelliJ) was my first real IDE and real programming experience. I was so blown away !
I switched to IntelliJ back when people where still arguing which of the two between Eclipse or NetBeans was better (fools!): that is, before some of the commenters here were born.
Heck, I bought IntelliJ when the world was ending in the Mayan calendar, it was something like 75% off because the world was going to end in a few weeks anyway.
But since 10+ years I'm using only... Emacs.
Emacs now with tree-sitter, LSPs, native-compilation, magit and the LLMs at ease with Un*x CLI tools make it so that IntelliJ looks like a behemoth. From a glorious past but still a behemoth.
I am spending a lot of time trying to migrate from decades of JetBrains IDEs to Emacs.
It's not trivial though and it's a good thing I am willing to tinker and explore. I got a decent Neovim development setup going in a few days with the help of blog posts but Emacs is a whole different story, with a lot of legacy terminology and a lot of very sporadic resources. Doom suffered (for me) from a lot of complexity, assumed emacs knowledge, and confusion for how to customize. Emacs Kickstart was closer to a jumping off point but still had a lot of confusing things going for it.
I'm still making the leap because I see the potential to have a truly customizable IDE that's customized to me (and not throwing AI things at me every few weeks) but sheesh, it's not trivial.
This week I had an LLM help me debug and resolve a subtle issue with Magit via TRAMP on macOS targets, and resolve it, plus a bunch of other small enhancements and fixes to my config. If your LLM agents have access to your Emacs config and installed packages, they can be really helpful in co-exploring your setup, explaining the behavior of built-ins as well as third-party plugins, and drafting new configuration.
Development is active, there are still great Emacs teachers creating books, blog posts, and videos, LLMs are genuinely good with Emacs, and the LSP ecosystem for Emacs is increasingly mature and well-integrated. There's never been a better time to jump in with Emacs, seriously.
Borland was way ahead of its time, nowadays there is no non-AI way to build a whole UI app in on afternoon like with Delphi/C++ Builder. Pity their greed prevented them from dominating via simplicity.
Completely agree. Also: some people enjoy fiddling with their tools, installing extensions and configuring everything until it's just perfect. Other people (most, I would argue - the proverbial "silent majority") want to get something that works reliably "out of the box" and has most (not all, IntelliJ IDEs also have plugins of course) batteries included. They shockingly are even willing to pay money for this!
The dream is something batteries-included but still radically hackable. Emacs is slowly making this feasible via smaller and smaller "starter kits" as it adds new features. It's not perfect, and maybe this approach will never yield a fully productized solution like IntelliJ. But getting a full-featured Emacs setup hasn't meant building the world from scratch in a long time!
I've used InteliJ on and off for 20 plus years. It's progressively got bloated and slower, not faster.
20 years ago it was the fast lean option when there was Netbeans and Eclipse. Today it's ok, still good feature wise but fast and lean it is not anymore when I've used it for Scala oand Kotlin.
I remember it was pretty slow even like early 2020s. But since they have introduced the new UI design IDE, somehow they have optimized it.
I think they made it modular so only the core module that is needed are loaded and some modules are loaded only if it's needed by a plugin. Also, they have optimized indexing as well. I remember the whole thing slowed down when it starts to index a medium size gradle project, but now it runs the indexing in the background but the rest of the IDE quite responsive.
However, it seems like in general they are moving at right direction when it comes to optimizing the core of the IDE and all other functionalities comes as plugins and you can just uninstall them if not needed. I use the community edition every day and recently I have been using claude code for coding, but I still use debug console most of the time. I haven't found another IDE which is as powerful as IDEA when it comes to debugging a JVM language project.
Yup. It's been particularly bad since around 2023/2024 and only got worse with all the AI crap, though I think that's been almost a useful scapegoat for them recently
I've tried (all?) the AI stuff they published, it was awful; but I was able to easily uninstall/deactivate those features once I realized it was not helpful.
On my MBP M4 or my Linux laptop, I never get the impression that it's bloat.
Prior to using IntelliJ I had been a Eclipse user and I've never experienced even 5% of the pain I had with Eclipse since moving to IntelliJ.
When everything is going to shite, I welcome with pleasure my yearly invoice from JetBrains, thinking that, at least, there is a company pushing quality software that deserves my money.
Also, like where else would the indices live? They are in memory to make going to definition, source, analysis etc fast. It's not even using java objects for these, so a feature-equivalent solution would be similarly "fat".
I don’t know, using Vim and Exuberant Ctags can give you a significant part of these features for a very lower footprint. But to be clear, it’s not a ready-to-go path on parity with DX that IntelliJ provides.
Hackers are often exceptionally good at optimizing the hidden parts no one give a shit until everything crumble under systemic slowness, but they often also are very bad at designing even a decent UX for everything else regarding in-your-face aspects.
>I don’t know, using Vim and Exuberant Ctags can give you a significant part of these features for a very lower footprint.
100% true.
Also, the problem I have with these magic thingies is that I don't know what to do if the magic stops working. With tools that just does one thing, I can easily figure out the point of failure and fix it.
When I worked as a Scala developer years ago, I still used JetBrains IDEs for some things but I did most of my work in Emacs using ENSIME and ggtags/xref as a fallback. I ended up using ggtags elsewhere as well, and was pretty impressed with both how far it got me and how fast it was.
This is actually not an exaggeration. Ive been using WebStorm when it worked well, then it became progressively slower to the point of being unusable even on small projects.
It's a bit strange to project a personal experience with one product onto all other products by the same vendor, even if those products use shared platform parts. Not to dismiss your claim, it's just IDEs (code engines specifically) are naturally pretty complicated pieces of software, so the experience may vary.
The claim that 8Gb RAM is required just for Intellij seems to be at least overgeneralization (also depends a bit on how you count RAM usage; e.g. do you count all mmaped files as RAM usage even when pages are not loaded?). Can be true for some projects, but I've been working on decently sized Java/Kotlin codebases (~250k locs) with way less RAM allocated for Intellij (again, your experience may vary). Even Intellij and Kotlin projects themselves have been usable with less memory, at least some time ago.
What's more baffling, though, is how an LSP would be significantly better if it is based on the same IDE core, just running headlessly? I think there may be an independent non-IDE based LSP for Scala, but both Java and Kotlin LSP are based on existing IDEs engines (Java LSP is based on Eclipse engine, Kotlin LSP is based on Intellij).
A quote from the kotlin-lsp GitHub repository:
> The language server is based on the most recent IntelliJ IDEA version and proprietary parts of JetBrains Air and Fleet products, making it partially closed-source.
I've tried using RustRover over WSL2 multiple times with every new release, but it's been a huge disappointment every time. My fans constantly spin like crazy, memory vanishes into thin air, and typing is super laggy - it even overwrites random sections of the file sometimes. On top of that, the built-in terminal is totally unusable because it craps out and freezes the app whenever there's a large output.
PyCharm, on the other hand, was always great to use. But since VS Code gives me pretty much everything I need for my daily work without demanding too much from my system, I've finally moved away from JetBrains.
I feel the same about VS Code, it's probably some of the plugins but sometimes, especially when LLMs make edits, memory usage explodes until my system breaks down and force pauses some apps until I kill some of them.
I should go back to Zed, maybe use the CLI interface for agentic programming instead of the UI.
I'm also on a mac, but in the last few years performance and memory usage has gotten pretty bad. Though we use Intellij for mostly Angular / Node projects. A colleague of mine had reverted to an older major release because it runs better on our Macs. He ended up switching over to a popular open source IDE and hasn't looked back.
I frequently have to restart PyCharm every few days, as it slows so bad that it cannot scroll or type smoothly. This is on a very powerful macbook pro....
I agree that IntelliJ is a monster of a resource hog, but I have yet to find an editor where code navigation is as good. That's basically all I use it for these days, in the days of LLMs, and I still think it's worth it. VSCode, especially for golang, is terrible. I might be holding it wrong, but I've really tried, and it's just not good enough.
Before LLMs, when I still refactored by hand, coworkers who were using vim or vscode used to ask me to do big refactors, because IntelliJ always got it right, whereas with the other editors it was hit-or-miss.
This is my experience and it really sucks that Jetbrains has devolved into such a poorly run company. It's clear a lot of their real talent who cared about the programming side and refactoring left years ago. Now it seems like all their product decisions are from bog standard non-technical business people who chase buzzwords.
This is a major problem for them because they fragmented their IDE codebase so much properly maintaining it requires resources and people they don't have and would have to invest years of effort to replace. But that doesn't maximize quarterly profit, so it's left to decay and we get hourly LLM plugin updates.
I've used IntelliJ since 2004 and it's always been a resource hog and always perpetually just beyond the faculties of the typical developer workstation. They've struggled with it since forever.
I don't think they've devolved at all. They've always been a mix of brilliance (far ahead of everyone else on refactoring and semantic analysis, etc) and challenges. And it has a lot to do I think with just being a relatively small team.
And the wave of LLM/agentic stuff has been a serious threat to them. Their efforts with Junie and the things before that have been faltering steps.
I do think it's beyond the point where they probably should just rewrite the core things they do in Rust. Their issue since day one has been it seems they're in a perpetual fight with the JVM garbage collector.
Significant portion of their staff left in 2022, when they decided to relocate from Russia and they keep bleeding engineers ever since. Despite registration in Prague, JetBrains has always been a Russian company with dominantly Russian employees.
Saying that VS Code is terrible for Go is simply false. The Go extension is regularly updated and works extremely well. Sure, it lacks some advanced refactoring features available in IntelliJ, like function parameters reordering, but gopls supports most refactoring you'd need to do day to day..
Sorry, but gopls doesn't even support moving files/packages and updating references properly - which is basic, tablestakes, "everyday" feature supported out of the box by Goland.
I can list 2 dozen other things that Gopls doesn't support but Goland does.
The fact we still don't have a decent Java language server is one of my canaries for the fact that LLMs still, generally speaking, can't ship. There is undeniably demand for this sort of thing, but nobody is coming to meet it. (jdtls, bless it for trying, is just not good)
Exactly. I've been trying to say this. Some people think that because people can write CRUD APIs and end-user apps with AI, no-one will need to write code anymore.
There is so much to be built in terms of tooling and libraries where we need tight, solid, well-crafted, original, unique code.
They have a real weakness when it comes to designing something that doesn't have a design precedent. There are no good java language servers, so it can't design a good java language server.
You can also show this with by e.g. asking an LLM to design an internet search engine in Java, for which there doesn't exist very many examples, and my own Marginalia Search and my devlog is one of few design examples it has to reach for.
Even mentioning nothing of MS just using similar constraints, you'll get a nearly identical design to Marginalia Search. Algorithm choices will be the same. Document and term IDs will encoded in a similar succinct fashion (in one of my experiments, the chosen design was binary compatible). Architecture will be the same. Services and components will to a significant degree have the same names and even using the same non-standard vocabulary. It isn't word for word identical, there sure are a lot of coincidental similarities that notably don't exist with search engines implemented in other languages.
To be clear, it’s not supported by a compiler, but rather plain tree sitter syntax parsing. I’m embarking on a bigger project to create a linter (and integrate) without relying on JVM or a compiler at all, but IDK when that’s gonna come.
That's just a wrapper for jdtls. I mean it works on some projects, but fails on many gradle builds and is basically just running the Eclipse IDE headlessly.
Metal, the Scala LSP, seems to do Java just fine. When using it in VSC, I feel the limitations compared to IntelliJ are more coming from VSC than from the LSP. Dependencies etc just resolve fine, it is just the UI that is not as polished as IntelliJ’s.
I try VSC with Metal twice a year. It works fine for small projects. But for bigger projects it lacks the more holistic approach that IntelliJ has and feels more like a text editor with smarts bolted on than an IDE.
I’m using Zed a lot as well for Golang and a bit for Rust. For Java it is also hard to use and lacking the same polish.
Nah, there is little demand for it that's the reason.
LLMs don't need a LSP, they work better without it often.
Most Java devs use IntelliJ or another IDE with its inbuilt thing.
For everyone else the existing one is good enough for incidental usage.
There are multiple questionable attempts at solving this problem in this comment thread. Where did they come from? We're also commenting on a blog post that is discussing an adjacent problem to this. ... which you decided to comment on?
I had this thought yesterday where I wondered if there was a way to run an Android app in the browser (definitely non trivial, but something I would expect to exist in some form) and nothing. If LLMs are as good as people say they are, I should be seeing plenty of useful projects like that popping up but.... I just see harnesses and other random things
My understanding was the biggest issue has always been that javac is a poor foundation for any kind of live tooling like LSPs?
It’s less “make me a Java LSP” than “rewrite javac around incremental compilation and exposing a semantic DB”. Which sounds like a much harder problem.
I was thinking of JEP 484, which I guess technically isn't a compiler API as much as it is a class file API, but that's kind of a big deal for this type of work as probably the primary work the parts of the classpath you currently aren't editing, moreso than parsing a single .java-file, and the kludges we had before this API (e.g. ASM) were incredibly fragile.
These are two different things; a language server would be a standardized intermediate layer between said CI tooling and any editor for inline / realtime checking, code suggestions and formatting.
People will go to great lengths to avoid paying for what is, arguably, an outstanding product from a great company, then think nothing of spending the same amount at Starbucks.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a company scrutinized and nitpicked as much as JetBrains.
Well its a russian company, and took part in the solarwinds hack, that was directly funded by the fsb. So, yeah, it should ve scrutinized, nitpicked and avoided at all costs.
Its 2026, there is no need for a proprieraty IDE that is stuck in the early 2000s.
JetBrains is and has always been a Czech (and, thus, EU) company, not a Russian one. Yes, the founders are Russian, but that does not make the company so. They did have Russian offices, but closed them after the start of the Ukraine war [1].
The only confirmed link to the SolarWinds attack seems to be that SolarWinds was using TeamCity (JetBrains' CI/CD product) and that this was alledgedly used as a "gateway" to SolarWinds' systems - which doesn't require any cooperation from JetBrains, just an unpatched security issue. In fact, a patch by JetBrains for the exploited issue seems to have been available, but was not installed [2].
So while any company deserves scrutiny, these particular allegations against JetBrains smell like FUD to me.
The company was registered in Prague for political and financial reasons, but it has always been Russian to the core. Yes, they had multiple offices outside of Russia, but they were still mostly populated by relocated Russians. That's why their product quality significantly dropped since 2022, as they've cut themselves from their main source of engineers.
Still has room for improvements, like finally getting their own incremental compiler instead of reusing the one from Eclipse, and better defaults for type inference tooltips and inspections.
Only last year finally got to support JNI development with mixed language debugging, which Eclipse and Netbeans have supported for the last 20 years.
Exactly, I've been using their community edition for years for Kotlin development. Works fine for normal day to day development needs. I had a paid subscription for a while that I just let expire because I rely more on agentic coding tools these days and I just don't write a lot of code by hand at this point. The paid version adds a lot of deeper integrations and tools that you may or may not need. Personally, I don't really miss most of that. These days the community edition and the paid edition are the same. But if you don't take a subscription, the paid stuff is unavailable.
As a company, Jetbrains is a private company. It's one of the few large software companies that managed to get there without selling out to VCs or the vultures on the stock market. Of course they want to make a profit but they also create a lot of value for developers. Including a lot of open source things. I think it's nice that it's still possible to create a business by bootstrapping and without compromising your values.
I don't see the OSS world as transactional. For example, I contribute some modest OSS projects for free without expectation of direct compensation. Lots of other people do similar things. That's what makes OSS work.
Some of that stuff is supported by big corporations that employ the people that work on those things and have a financial interest in making sure those things continue to exist. As a result, I get to stand on the shoulders of giants. That extends to things like Linux, databases and other middleware, frameworks and libraries, and lots and lots of developer tools.
I pay for plenty of SAAS stuff when I need to or when it adds value. Just not for Intellij.
In most profession, you don’t have a continuous flow of new tools to evaluate if they worth integrating in your workflow, which is already heavily time costly, and tools rarely break overnight due to some remote ecosystemic reason or cease to work due to license expiration/change/whatever.
How enthusiast are most professional to throw money at "smart" tools, hmm?
I would pay for tooling, but most of them is now pure grift. Even Jetbrains has gone the anticonsumer route with their focus on AI (plugins enabled by default).
The money has to come from somewhere, otherwise it is yet another doom and gloom of a FOSS project being acquired by a big corp, or the author moving on into proprietary software, donations hardly put food on the table outside rockstar level projects.
As a very heavy user of IntelliJ and associated family of IDEs, I’d say they are extremely bloated compared to a few years ago. My latest annoyance with IDEA has been extremely slow disk sync. If I edit something outside the IDE, it takes a while to appear in it.
They should cut down the binary size and ship a leaner version without all the bundled plugins. They should improve performance on extremely large projects (both memory and IO).
Although I have let my personal Ultimate subscription expire, I still use it at work because debugger, codenav and autocompletion are still best in class.
I'm trying to avoid IntelliJ because I only need it for editing TeamCity build configuration files, that are written in a Kotlin based DSL [0], and autocomplete and linting are be very helpful.
I've tried Eclipse and VS Code but I don't get them to autocomplete or detect syntax correctly. Would any LSP help me with that? As I have no idea about Java, Kotlin or Gradle, everything is kinda confusing to me...
And I hate it with a passion. The fact they they introduced their own terminology, their own lifecycle, always makes me doubt what will happen when I use any feature of their client.
Magit OTOH stays much closer to the true git. Although for anything slightly more esoteric I still prefer native git cli.
I wrote an LSP for kotlin and java recently and it's so annoying how tightly coupled all the LSP stuff is in IntelliJ to the IDE itself they have a outside LSP project which seems to be going very slow or nowhere is very sad.
Note I tried to use IntelliJ to build it the performance was not nearly as nice as I would have liked still better than a lot of LSPs but still.
I know a bunch of folks have tried it but I think only Jetbrains can build a good one, unless someone actually goes all in on solving this for a few months and rebuilds the parsing and types systems outside of the Jetbrains toolchain and ecosystem.
Java is likely easier but it's also quite jank in terms of how existing solutions work.
But I like projects like this, I am not against IntelliJ it must be great had been great when I was learning but I want a lsp to use for scripts and the small edits, opening a massive IDE is very overkill for the kinds of small changes I like to make now.
I will quote the blog post announcing Kotlin as project, so naturally it is tied to InteliJ.
"The next thing is also fairly straightforward: we expect Kotlin to drive the sales of IntelliJ IDEA. We’re working on a new language, but we do not plan to replace the entire ecosystem of libraries that have been built for the JVM. So you’re likely to keep using Spring and Hibernate, or other similar frameworks, in your projects built with Kotlin. And while the development tools for Kotlin itself are going to be free and open-source, the support for the enterprise development frameworks and tools will remain part of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, the commercial version of the IDE. And of course the framework support will be fully integrated with Kotlin."
Given how much outside support they have received they could also make a paid lsp available like they had Resharper, I would be willing to pay for a paid lsp if I use the language enough.
10$ a month for an LSP with all the bells and whistles, should be easier to maintain than an entire IDE tbh. And they can sell me on advanced features in their IDEs through it.
I just don't want to have to open a bulky IDE anymore, IDEs just suck for me as a development tool.
Sometimes I also feel that Idea is too slow, especially for smaller projects or languages where I do not need top tier support. ie. I am backend rust and python programmer. I also have to work with JS/TS and C++ projects but I mostly only read through them.
I started using neovim with plugins if syntax highlighting and good navigation is enough. I have also set up ideavim configuration to be as close to neovim as possible. Now I can easily switch between Idea and neovim with almost the same workflow.
I enjoy JetBrains IDEs alot. Altough I mainly use Dataspell and Datagrip and not Intellij but they make my life easier. Specifically when connecting to new DBs
I've been using Goland/IntelliJ since I graduated. Been paying for it for years. But the resource hog and I guess focus on writing a mediocre AI side panel really killed it for me.
The main improvements lately were:
- line/function prediction
- Claude Code plugin
And I can use Claude Code in any terminal. So I've switched to zed.dev and use Claude there. Wish it had the line prediction though.
It's great that Emacs gets more support of course, but personally I've never really got the hang of it. I actually like IntelliJ. To the point that I can't even bear VS Code. And for simple editing, vi is still my thing. I don't think that will ever change. I assume Emacs sits somewhere between the two.
Java LSPs are essentially the same approach, headless Eclipse JDT or NetBeans.
While Metals for Scala was an overhaul from the former Eclipse plugin (and Ensime) plus early experiments embedded in the Scala 3 compiler. And Metals v2 is yet another rewrite.
I was thinking of unsubscribing from IntelliJ just today because my file tree doesn't update for like 5 minutes when I create new files with my terminal. Its utterly broken.
This one is even better. Your refusing to tune your OS is like coming to a restaurant with gluten intolerance and expecting to eat anything without getting sick because you paid 30$ for your dish.
Maintain your gut health is your responsibility. Maintaining your OS to be able to run software (paid or free) – likewise. IDEA even displays helpful tips asking you to do so.
Same for the jetbrains PHP based IDE (iirc named something in the likes of webstorm, or phpwind etc) is super slow and hogs ram like crazy. Also most devs using it have really, relly poor skills. Its weird i know, but i see it time and time again.
> But what do you actually get with IntelliJ? A massive, monolithic Java application that frequently hogs 8GB+ of RAM, locks up your system while “indexing pre-built binaries,” and forces you into a closed proprietary ecosystem.
This is just exaggeration. I use IntelliJIDEA everyday (on mac) with multiple projects open and tbh they have optimized the IDE a lot to make it faster. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's getting better. Also it's not closed source. The core of the IDE is open source (https://github.com/jetbrains/intellij-community) and for some specific framework support (e.g. Spring) are available on Ultimate.
IntelliJ (actually Android Studio based on IntelliJ) was my first real IDE and real programming experience. I was so blown away !
Almost 15 years later, nothing else matches the out of the box experience of IntelliJ, atleast for JVM based languages.
> IntelliJ (actually Android Studio based on IntelliJ) was my first real IDE and real programming experience. I was so blown away !
I switched to IntelliJ back when people where still arguing which of the two between Eclipse or NetBeans was better (fools!): that is, before some of the commenters here were born.
Heck, I bought IntelliJ when the world was ending in the Mayan calendar, it was something like 75% off because the world was going to end in a few weeks anyway.
But since 10+ years I'm using only... Emacs.
Emacs now with tree-sitter, LSPs, native-compilation, magit and the LLMs at ease with Un*x CLI tools make it so that IntelliJ looks like a behemoth. From a glorious past but still a behemoth.
I am spending a lot of time trying to migrate from decades of JetBrains IDEs to Emacs.
It's not trivial though and it's a good thing I am willing to tinker and explore. I got a decent Neovim development setup going in a few days with the help of blog posts but Emacs is a whole different story, with a lot of legacy terminology and a lot of very sporadic resources. Doom suffered (for me) from a lot of complexity, assumed emacs knowledge, and confusion for how to customize. Emacs Kickstart was closer to a jumping off point but still had a lot of confusing things going for it.
I'm still making the leap because I see the potential to have a truly customizable IDE that's customized to me (and not throwing AI things at me every few weeks) but sheesh, it's not trivial.
Same, from beginning to end!
This week I had an LLM help me debug and resolve a subtle issue with Magit via TRAMP on macOS targets, and resolve it, plus a bunch of other small enhancements and fixes to my config. If your LLM agents have access to your Emacs config and installed packages, they can be really helpful in co-exploring your setup, explaining the behavior of built-ins as well as third-party plugins, and drafting new configuration.
Development is active, there are still great Emacs teachers creating books, blog posts, and videos, LLMs are genuinely good with Emacs, and the LSP ecosystem for Emacs is increasingly mature and well-integrated. There's never been a better time to jump in with Emacs, seriously.
Add in VS for .NET languages and C++ (hot reload, debugging capabilities), and the beloved Delphi/C++ Builder duo as well.
To this day there isn't anything like C++ Builder, if you want the famous VB dev experience, but with C++.
Borland was way ahead of its time, nowadays there is no non-AI way to build a whole UI app in on afternoon like with Delphi/C++ Builder. Pity their greed prevented them from dominating via simplicity.
I have used both VS and Rider for .NET development and for me Rider beats VS by a mile.
As long as you only do Web development with .NET.
Completely agree. Also: some people enjoy fiddling with their tools, installing extensions and configuring everything until it's just perfect. Other people (most, I would argue - the proverbial "silent majority") want to get something that works reliably "out of the box" and has most (not all, IntelliJ IDEs also have plugins of course) batteries included. They shockingly are even willing to pay money for this!
The dream is something batteries-included but still radically hackable. Emacs is slowly making this feasible via smaller and smaller "starter kits" as it adds new features. It's not perfect, and maybe this approach will never yield a fully productized solution like IntelliJ. But getting a full-featured Emacs setup hasn't meant building the world from scratch in a long time!
I've used InteliJ on and off for 20 plus years. It's progressively got bloated and slower, not faster.
20 years ago it was the fast lean option when there was Netbeans and Eclipse. Today it's ok, still good feature wise but fast and lean it is not anymore when I've used it for Scala oand Kotlin.
I remember it was pretty slow even like early 2020s. But since they have introduced the new UI design IDE, somehow they have optimized it.
I think they made it modular so only the core module that is needed are loaded and some modules are loaded only if it's needed by a plugin. Also, they have optimized indexing as well. I remember the whole thing slowed down when it starts to index a medium size gradle project, but now it runs the indexing in the background but the rest of the IDE quite responsive.
However, it seems like in general they are moving at right direction when it comes to optimizing the core of the IDE and all other functionalities comes as plugins and you can just uninstall them if not needed. I use the community edition every day and recently I have been using claude code for coding, but I still use debug console most of the time. I haven't found another IDE which is as powerful as IDEA when it comes to debugging a JVM language project.
Yup. It's been particularly bad since around 2023/2024 and only got worse with all the AI crap, though I think that's been almost a useful scapegoat for them recently
I've tried (all?) the AI stuff they published, it was awful; but I was able to easily uninstall/deactivate those features once I realized it was not helpful.
On my MBP M4 or my Linux laptop, I never get the impression that it's bloat.
Prior to using IntelliJ I had been a Eclipse user and I've never experienced even 5% of the pain I had with Eclipse since moving to IntelliJ.
When everything is going to shite, I welcome with pleasure my yearly invoice from JetBrains, thinking that, at least, there is a company pushing quality software that deserves my money.
Emacs is great for LISP-like langs.
IJ is great for JVM langs.
Sure one can cross-use the above, but that's harder.
Still great to have an IDE agnostic Kotlin LSP!
Also, like where else would the indices live? They are in memory to make going to definition, source, analysis etc fast. It's not even using java objects for these, so a feature-equivalent solution would be similarly "fat".
I don’t know, using Vim and Exuberant Ctags can give you a significant part of these features for a very lower footprint. But to be clear, it’s not a ready-to-go path on parity with DX that IntelliJ provides.
Hackers are often exceptionally good at optimizing the hidden parts no one give a shit until everything crumble under systemic slowness, but they often also are very bad at designing even a decent UX for everything else regarding in-your-face aspects.
>I don’t know, using Vim and Exuberant Ctags can give you a significant part of these features for a very lower footprint.
100% true.
Also, the problem I have with these magic thingies is that I don't know what to do if the magic stops working. With tools that just does one thing, I can easily figure out the point of failure and fix it.
When I worked as a Scala developer years ago, I still used JetBrains IDEs for some things but I did most of my work in Emacs using ENSIME and ggtags/xref as a fallback. I ended up using ggtags elsewhere as well, and was pretty impressed with both how far it got me and how fast it was.
For the record Neovim has built-in LSP support and Vim supports LSP with plugins. Why use Ctags that you have to manually generate?
This is actually not an exaggeration. Ive been using WebStorm when it worked well, then it became progressively slower to the point of being unusable even on small projects.
It's a bit strange to project a personal experience with one product onto all other products by the same vendor, even if those products use shared platform parts. Not to dismiss your claim, it's just IDEs (code engines specifically) are naturally pretty complicated pieces of software, so the experience may vary.
The claim that 8Gb RAM is required just for Intellij seems to be at least overgeneralization (also depends a bit on how you count RAM usage; e.g. do you count all mmaped files as RAM usage even when pages are not loaded?). Can be true for some projects, but I've been working on decently sized Java/Kotlin codebases (~250k locs) with way less RAM allocated for Intellij (again, your experience may vary). Even Intellij and Kotlin projects themselves have been usable with less memory, at least some time ago.
What's more baffling, though, is how an LSP would be significantly better if it is based on the same IDE core, just running headlessly? I think there may be an independent non-IDE based LSP for Scala, but both Java and Kotlin LSP are based on existing IDEs engines (Java LSP is based on Eclipse engine, Kotlin LSP is based on Intellij).
A quote from the kotlin-lsp GitHub repository: > The language server is based on the most recent IntelliJ IDEA version and proprietary parts of JetBrains Air and Fleet products, making it partially closed-source.
https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlin-lsp
Counterpoint: use intellij on full stack apps with cdk, react, sqls and whatnot, multiple open at a time, without any problem.
I've tried using RustRover over WSL2 multiple times with every new release, but it's been a huge disappointment every time. My fans constantly spin like crazy, memory vanishes into thin air, and typing is super laggy - it even overwrites random sections of the file sometimes. On top of that, the built-in terminal is totally unusable because it craps out and freezes the app whenever there's a large output.
PyCharm, on the other hand, was always great to use. But since VS Code gives me pretty much everything I need for my daily work without demanding too much from my system, I've finally moved away from JetBrains.
It sounds like IntelliJ is out of memory and the GC is thrashing. Increase the IDE's heap size(1), and it will probably work fine.
(1) It's a menu option these days.
I've got Android Studio open now, while also working in several PyCharm projects, IntelliJ and WebStorm. No issues at all on macOS.
I feel the same about VS Code, it's probably some of the plugins but sometimes, especially when LLMs make edits, memory usage explodes until my system breaks down and force pauses some apps until I kill some of them.
I should go back to Zed, maybe use the CLI interface for agentic programming instead of the UI.
Quite ironic, given that Emacs used to stand for "Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping" for the epoch hardware.
Also ironic given that emacs with a LSP server is more than capable of slowing a dev machine to a crawl
People will complain about 2MB ram usage and then gladly spend 4k on a mac pc
I'm also on a mac, but in the last few years performance and memory usage has gotten pretty bad. Though we use Intellij for mostly Angular / Node projects. A colleague of mine had reverted to an older major release because it runs better on our Macs. He ended up switching over to a popular open source IDE and hasn't looked back.
I frequently have to restart PyCharm every few days, as it slows so bad that it cannot scroll or type smoothly. This is on a very powerful macbook pro....
I agree that IntelliJ is a monster of a resource hog, but I have yet to find an editor where code navigation is as good. That's basically all I use it for these days, in the days of LLMs, and I still think it's worth it. VSCode, especially for golang, is terrible. I might be holding it wrong, but I've really tried, and it's just not good enough.
Before LLMs, when I still refactored by hand, coworkers who were using vim or vscode used to ask me to do big refactors, because IntelliJ always got it right, whereas with the other editors it was hit-or-miss.
This is my experience and it really sucks that Jetbrains has devolved into such a poorly run company. It's clear a lot of their real talent who cared about the programming side and refactoring left years ago. Now it seems like all their product decisions are from bog standard non-technical business people who chase buzzwords.
This is a major problem for them because they fragmented their IDE codebase so much properly maintaining it requires resources and people they don't have and would have to invest years of effort to replace. But that doesn't maximize quarterly profit, so it's left to decay and we get hourly LLM plugin updates.
I've used IntelliJ since 2004 and it's always been a resource hog and always perpetually just beyond the faculties of the typical developer workstation. They've struggled with it since forever.
I don't think they've devolved at all. They've always been a mix of brilliance (far ahead of everyone else on refactoring and semantic analysis, etc) and challenges. And it has a lot to do I think with just being a relatively small team.
And the wave of LLM/agentic stuff has been a serious threat to them. Their efforts with Junie and the things before that have been faltering steps.
I do think it's beyond the point where they probably should just rewrite the core things they do in Rust. Their issue since day one has been it seems they're in a perpetual fight with the JVM garbage collector.
Significant portion of their staff left in 2022, when they decided to relocate from Russia and they keep bleeding engineers ever since. Despite registration in Prague, JetBrains has always been a Russian company with dominantly Russian employees.
Saying that VS Code is terrible for Go is simply false. The Go extension is regularly updated and works extremely well. Sure, it lacks some advanced refactoring features available in IntelliJ, like function parameters reordering, but gopls supports most refactoring you'd need to do day to day..
I think OP talks about code navigation, which is objectively terrible on vscode in general
Sorry, but gopls doesn't even support moving files/packages and updating references properly - which is basic, tablestakes, "everyday" feature supported out of the box by Goland.
I can list 2 dozen other things that Gopls doesn't support but Goland does.
> code navigation
Do you mean GUI, keyboard shortcuts, search dialogs, all the above?
I'm frustrated with (find and) search. So many options. It's both too much and too little.
But what would something better look like? Spotlight (Alfred, Raycast)? fff (fast fuzzy finder)?
I'm hoping I'll know it when I see it.
The fact we still don't have a decent Java language server is one of my canaries for the fact that LLMs still, generally speaking, can't ship. There is undeniably demand for this sort of thing, but nobody is coming to meet it. (jdtls, bless it for trying, is just not good)
Exactly. I've been trying to say this. Some people think that because people can write CRUD APIs and end-user apps with AI, no-one will need to write code anymore.
There is so much to be built in terms of tooling and libraries where we need tight, solid, well-crafted, original, unique code.
They have a real weakness when it comes to designing something that doesn't have a design precedent. There are no good java language servers, so it can't design a good java language server.
You can also show this with by e.g. asking an LLM to design an internet search engine in Java, for which there doesn't exist very many examples, and my own Marginalia Search and my devlog is one of few design examples it has to reach for.
Even mentioning nothing of MS just using similar constraints, you'll get a nearly identical design to Marginalia Search. Algorithm choices will be the same. Document and term IDs will encoded in a similar succinct fashion (in one of my experiments, the chosen design was binary compatible). Architecture will be the same. Services and components will to a significant degree have the same names and even using the same non-standard vocabulary. It isn't word for word identical, there sure are a lot of coincidental similarities that notably don't exist with search engines implemented in other languages.
I am actively working on a fast language server for Java and kotlin.
I’m driving it daily and it’s much faster than IJ for what I need, although it doesn’t provide all the diagnostics that IJ does…
It’s on github.com/pepegar/ktlsp if you’re curious.
To be clear, it’s not supported by a compiler, but rather plain tree sitter syntax parsing. I’m embarking on a bigger project to create a linter (and integrate) without relying on JVM or a compiler at all, but IDK when that’s gonna come.
The one in VS Code seems fine. It's not quite intellij level, but what is.
And speaking on llm and lsp. The new PHP lsp PHPantom (with help of llms) is approaching jetbrains offering fast.
That's just a wrapper for jdtls. I mean it works on some projects, but fails on many gradle builds and is basically just running the Eclipse IDE headlessly.
This is probably the one contender:
https://github.com/georgewfraser/java-language-server
and it kinda works, but it's also a bit lacking.
Metal, the Scala LSP, seems to do Java just fine. When using it in VSC, I feel the limitations compared to IntelliJ are more coming from VSC than from the LSP. Dependencies etc just resolve fine, it is just the UI that is not as polished as IntelliJ’s.
I try VSC with Metal twice a year. It works fine for small projects. But for bigger projects it lacks the more holistic approach that IntelliJ has and feels more like a text editor with smarts bolted on than an IDE.
I’m using Zed a lot as well for Golang and a bit for Rust. For Java it is also hard to use and lacking the same polish.
The problem is using Gradle, for starters.
I do enjoy my 3s build times though, even if it comes at a considerable cost of sanity points whenever anything needs changing or doing in the build.
Out of curiosity, have you had a short at https://mill-build.org/mill/comparisons/gradle.html ?
After how many GB dedicated to keeping the Gradle daemon running with acceptable performance?
oracle has some lsp based on netbeans, but it's not great either
What's missing from PHPantom?
How is the Oracle one? It has better reviews in VS Code marketplace than the Red Hat one (jdtls)
Nah, there is little demand for it that's the reason.
LLMs don't need a LSP, they work better without it often. Most Java devs use IntelliJ or another IDE with its inbuilt thing. For everyone else the existing one is good enough for incidental usage.
So ~no one cares
I care, which is existence proof that someone cares.
~no one == approximately no one
There are multiple questionable attempts at solving this problem in this comment thread. Where did they come from? We're also commenting on a blog post that is discussing an adjacent problem to this. ... which you decided to comment on?
> LLMs don't need a LSP, they work better without it often
How could LLM's work better without LSP when LSP is something don't interact with?
I had this thought yesterday where I wondered if there was a way to run an Android app in the browser (definitely non trivial, but something I would expect to exist in some form) and nothing. If LLMs are as good as people say they are, I should be seeing plenty of useful projects like that popping up but.... I just see harnesses and other random things
My understanding was the biggest issue has always been that javac is a poor foundation for any kind of live tooling like LSPs?
It’s less “make me a Java LSP” than “rewrite javac around incremental compilation and exposing a semantic DB”. Which sounds like a much harder problem.
We have a java compiler API nowadays that solves this.
It looks like that was added in Java SE 6, and doesn’t materially change the underlying problem. Have there been more recent developments?
I was thinking of JEP 484, which I guess technically isn't a compiler API as much as it is a class file API, but that's kind of a big deal for this type of work as probably the primary work the parts of the classpath you currently aren't editing, moreso than parsing a single .java-file, and the kludges we had before this API (e.g. ASM) were incredibly fragile.
why do you need a java language server? Let them use the same tooling you would use in CI
These are two different things; a language server would be a standardized intermediate layer between said CI tooling and any editor for inline / realtime checking, code suggestions and formatting.
People will go to great lengths to avoid paying for what is, arguably, an outstanding product from a great company, then think nothing of spending the same amount at Starbucks.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a company scrutinized and nitpicked as much as JetBrains.
Well its a russian company, and took part in the solarwinds hack, that was directly funded by the fsb. So, yeah, it should ve scrutinized, nitpicked and avoided at all costs.
Its 2026, there is no need for a proprieraty IDE that is stuck in the early 2000s.
JetBrains is and has always been a Czech (and, thus, EU) company, not a Russian one. Yes, the founders are Russian, but that does not make the company so. They did have Russian offices, but closed them after the start of the Ukraine war [1].
The only confirmed link to the SolarWinds attack seems to be that SolarWinds was using TeamCity (JetBrains' CI/CD product) and that this was alledgedly used as a "gateway" to SolarWinds' systems - which doesn't require any cooperation from JetBrains, just an unpatched security issue. In fact, a patch by JetBrains for the exploited issue seems to have been available, but was not installed [2].
So while any company deserves scrutiny, these particular allegations against JetBrains smell like FUD to me.
See also JetBrains' own statements on the SolarWinds thing: https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2021/01/06/statement-on-the-...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBrains
[2]: https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa...
The company was registered in Prague for political and financial reasons, but it has always been Russian to the core. Yes, they had multiple offices outside of Russia, but they were still mostly populated by relocated Russians. That's why their product quality significantly dropped since 2022, as they've cut themselves from their main source of engineers.
You're right about SolarWinds though.
So we get to replace it for a programmer's editor from the early 1980's instead, good call.
They closed all their russian office locations at the start of the Ukraine war afaik so I wouldn't call it russian any more.
Once russian, always russian. You cant remove the ruski once its rooted.
> Its 2026, there is no need for a proprieraty IDE that is stuck in the early 2000s.
This is the best IDE for Java. And it is nowhere near 2000s, it is modern and the best one can use for Java.
Still has room for improvements, like finally getting their own incremental compiler instead of reusing the one from Eclipse, and better defaults for type inference tooltips and inspections.
Only last year finally got to support JNI development with mixed language debugging, which Eclipse and Netbeans have supported for the last 20 years.
Source: trust me bro
> and forces you into a closed proprietary ecosystem
https://github.com/jetbrains/intellij-community ?
Exactly, I've been using their community edition for years for Kotlin development. Works fine for normal day to day development needs. I had a paid subscription for a while that I just let expire because I rely more on agentic coding tools these days and I just don't write a lot of code by hand at this point. The paid version adds a lot of deeper integrations and tools that you may or may not need. Personally, I don't really miss most of that. These days the community edition and the paid edition are the same. But if you don't take a subscription, the paid stuff is unavailable.
As a company, Jetbrains is a private company. It's one of the few large software companies that managed to get there without selling out to VCs or the vultures on the stock market. Of course they want to make a profit but they also create a lot of value for developers. Including a lot of open source things. I think it's nice that it's still possible to create a business by bootstrapping and without compromising your values.
I keep finding interesting that some devs refuse to pay for tooling like every other profession, yet they don't take pull requests as salary either.
I don't see the OSS world as transactional. For example, I contribute some modest OSS projects for free without expectation of direct compensation. Lots of other people do similar things. That's what makes OSS work.
Some of that stuff is supported by big corporations that employ the people that work on those things and have a financial interest in making sure those things continue to exist. As a result, I get to stand on the shoulders of giants. That extends to things like Linux, databases and other middleware, frameworks and libraries, and lots and lots of developer tools.
I pay for plenty of SAAS stuff when I need to or when it adds value. Just not for Intellij.
In most profession, you don’t have a continuous flow of new tools to evaluate if they worth integrating in your workflow, which is already heavily time costly, and tools rarely break overnight due to some remote ecosystemic reason or cease to work due to license expiration/change/whatever.
How enthusiast are most professional to throw money at "smart" tools, hmm?
Here is an hint from someone walking the planet since the 1970's, you also don't need to follow every fashion in IT.
I would pay for tooling, but most of them is now pure grift. Even Jetbrains has gone the anticonsumer route with their focus on AI (plugins enabled by default).
The money has to come from somewhere, otherwise it is yet another doom and gloom of a FOSS project being acquired by a big corp, or the author moving on into proprietary software, donations hardly put food on the table outside rockstar level projects.
The Metals documentation includes instructions for setting it up with Emacs. I followed them, and everything works, including worksheets.
https://scalameta.org/metals/docs/editors/emacs
As a very heavy user of IntelliJ and associated family of IDEs, I’d say they are extremely bloated compared to a few years ago. My latest annoyance with IDEA has been extremely slow disk sync. If I edit something outside the IDE, it takes a while to appear in it.
They should cut down the binary size and ship a leaner version without all the bundled plugins. They should improve performance on extremely large projects (both memory and IO).
Although I have let my personal Ultimate subscription expire, I still use it at work because debugger, codenav and autocompletion are still best in class.
I'm trying to avoid IntelliJ because I only need it for editing TeamCity build configuration files, that are written in a Kotlin based DSL [0], and autocomplete and linting are be very helpful.
I've tried Eclipse and VS Code but I don't get them to autocomplete or detect syntax correctly. Would any LSP help me with that? As I have no idea about Java, Kotlin or Gradle, everything is kinda confusing to me...
--
IntelliJ Git integration is so good I wish it would be a standalone client.
You can do "idea diff file1 file1" to open a popup with their diff tool.
Funnily that's the one feature I dislike in IntelliJ and thus relies on another GUI
Otherwise I like having everything in one place: code, containers, databases, remotes...
What are you using instead?
https://git-fork.com/ on MacOS/Win
https://sourcegit-scm.github.io/ on Linux
And I hate it with a passion. The fact they they introduced their own terminology, their own lifecycle, always makes me doubt what will happen when I use any feature of their client.
Magit OTOH stays much closer to the true git. Although for anything slightly more esoteric I still prefer native git cli.
I wrote an LSP for kotlin and java recently and it's so annoying how tightly coupled all the LSP stuff is in IntelliJ to the IDE itself they have a outside LSP project which seems to be going very slow or nowhere is very sad.
Note I tried to use IntelliJ to build it the performance was not nearly as nice as I would have liked still better than a lot of LSPs but still.
I know a bunch of folks have tried it but I think only Jetbrains can build a good one, unless someone actually goes all in on solving this for a few months and rebuilds the parsing and types systems outside of the Jetbrains toolchain and ecosystem.
Java is likely easier but it's also quite jank in terms of how existing solutions work.
But I like projects like this, I am not against IntelliJ it must be great had been great when I was learning but I want a lsp to use for scripts and the small edits, opening a massive IDE is very overkill for the kinds of small changes I like to make now.
I will quote the blog post announcing Kotlin as project, so naturally it is tied to InteliJ.
"The next thing is also fairly straightforward: we expect Kotlin to drive the sales of IntelliJ IDEA. We’re working on a new language, but we do not plan to replace the entire ecosystem of libraries that have been built for the JVM. So you’re likely to keep using Spring and Hibernate, or other similar frameworks, in your projects built with Kotlin. And while the development tools for Kotlin itself are going to be free and open-source, the support for the enterprise development frameworks and tools will remain part of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, the commercial version of the IDE. And of course the framework support will be fully integrated with Kotlin."
https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2011/08/why-jetbrains-need...
Given how much outside support they have received they could also make a paid lsp available like they had Resharper, I would be willing to pay for a paid lsp if I use the language enough.
10$ a month for an LSP with all the bells and whistles, should be easier to maintain than an entire IDE tbh. And they can sell me on advanced features in their IDEs through it.
I just don't want to have to open a bulky IDE anymore, IDEs just suck for me as a development tool.
Sometimes I also feel that Idea is too slow, especially for smaller projects or languages where I do not need top tier support. ie. I am backend rust and python programmer. I also have to work with JS/TS and C++ projects but I mostly only read through them.
I started using neovim with plugins if syntax highlighting and good navigation is enough. I have also set up ideavim configuration to be as close to neovim as possible. Now I can easily switch between Idea and neovim with almost the same workflow.
I enjoy JetBrains IDEs alot. Altough I mainly use Dataspell and Datagrip and not Intellij but they make my life easier. Specifically when connecting to new DBs
I've been using Goland/IntelliJ since I graduated. Been paying for it for years. But the resource hog and I guess focus on writing a mediocre AI side panel really killed it for me.
The main improvements lately were:
- line/function prediction
- Claude Code plugin
And I can use Claude Code in any terminal. So I've switched to zed.dev and use Claude there. Wish it had the line prediction though.
Your writing Scala, let's be real your ide resources are not your primary concern. The way it actually understands your interface is.
It's great that Emacs gets more support of course, but personally I've never really got the hang of it. I actually like IntelliJ. To the point that I can't even bear VS Code. And for simple editing, vi is still my thing. I don't think that will ever change. I assume Emacs sits somewhere between the two.
Can Java developers run a GUI builder outside the IDE and then use any other editor for the rest and then compile a project with Maven and the like?
Of course, at least those of us that know Java since 1996, and the only thing we got was the 1.0.2 JDK on a magazine cover CD ROM.
oh I thought this was somehow extracting the proprietary LSP engine that IntelliJ has and using it with Emacs.
I think Jetbrains did that already; the Kotlin LSP server is derived from the (also open source) IntelliJ plugin
worth noting the kotlin-lsp here is jetbrains own, basically intellij analysis engine running headless. you're just dropping the intellij gui
Java LSPs are essentially the same approach, headless Eclipse JDT or NetBeans.
While Metals for Scala was an overhaul from the former Eclipse plugin (and Ensime) plus early experiments embedded in the Scala 3 compiler. And Metals v2 is yet another rewrite.
Metals is architectured in a completely different way, see the BSP: https://build-server-protocol.github.io
users should just turn off all the plugins they'll never or rarely use.
I was thinking of unsubscribing from IntelliJ just today because my file tree doesn't update for like 5 minutes when I create new files with my terminal. Its utterly broken.
Let me guess, macos?
Nah Lenovo ThinkPad
Have you increased the number of inotify watches?
I'm having issue on mac, but never had it on Linux after setting inotify limits sufficiently high
Hmm I could try that, but honestly I dont see why I should pay 30€ a month for an IDE that I have to manually tweak for :/
You still have to put gas in the tank of your car, no matter if you own 20k used Civic or 350k Ferrari
Sure but this analogy is weird. I dont have to cook my own pasta in a restaurant, would be a counter analogy which is just as unfitting.
That was a good analogy.
This one is even better. Your refusing to tune your OS is like coming to a restaurant with gluten intolerance and expecting to eat anything without getting sick because you paid 30$ for your dish.
Maintain your gut health is your responsibility. Maintaining your OS to be able to run software (paid or free) – likewise. IDEA even displays helpful tips asking you to do so.
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Same for the jetbrains PHP based IDE (iirc named something in the likes of webstorm, or phpwind etc) is super slow and hogs ram like crazy. Also most devs using it have really, relly poor skills. Its weird i know, but i see it time and time again.
> Also most devs using it have really, relly poor skills. Its weird i know, but i see it time and time again.
Specifically in the PHP community? Legitimately curious...