No More JetBrains Products for Me

Source: Hacker News

Why I switched to Zed

After seeing that Zed recently released v1 of their editor, I figured that now was as good a time as any to give it a try. While there are some quirks on Linux (specifically a flickering bug on Wayland that was recently fixed), I feel comfortable running it every day on my main machine. The defaults are mostly sane, the editor is fast and responsive, and the compatibility with much of Visual Studio Code’s environment is great. Even the AI integration is tasteful and not terribly in my way. Zed will be my primary editor going forward.

Problems with CLion

For a long time I’ve been paying JetBrains ~$85 a year for their IDE. I’ve been using CLion for all of my day‑to‑day work for years, and I genuinely appreciate the UI, sane defaults, and powerful debugging insight. All of the core ideas of JetBrains products are solid and well executed, which makes the decision to leave even harder.

The deal‑breaker, however, is performance:

• Extreme slowness – CLion feels remarkably slow, especially on older hardware. Simple editing tasks become sluggish, and the IDE consistently eats CPU and RAM.
• File creation delay – Creating a new file triggers a “Create File” popup with a loading screen. The delay is intermittent but frequent enough to be annoying.
• Abysmal startup times – The splash screen lingers, making me hesitant to even open the editor.
• Project switching – Switching between projects suffers from the same poor performance.
• Remote Development quirks – On slower machines, remote sessions often disconnect abruptly.
• Repeated re‑indexing – The IDE frequently re‑indexes the codebase under unclear circumstances, causing additional stalls.
• Large disk footprint – The installation occupies a substantial amount of disk space, which is problematic on older machines with limited storage.

When all of these issues combine, they make me not want to program. I don’t want to wait for startup times, worry about exhausting CPU or RAM, or be forced out of a flow state by the IDE itself.

TL;DR

My relationship with JetBrains is over—for now. Zed is the way forward for me, and I expect to be a happier programmer because of it.