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Discussion on: Why I Switched From Visual Studio Code To JetBrains WebStorm

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Casey Brooks

I haven't used VSCode much at all, but for speed, I've found the IntelliJ products to feel quite a bit faster than VSCode on my MacBook.

IntelliJ is quite RAM-hungry though, I've got 16gb of RAM and IntelliJ chews through a good portion of that. If you are using a computer with less RAM, that might be the main cause for slowness you're seeing with WebStorm.

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Tamas Herman

I think ppl struggle with 8GB (macOS) setups, because they have shit load of browser tabs, like whatsapp, gmail, github pages open, along with lots of electron apps, like slack, discord, telegram, gitter, notion and those "steal" a lot of memory from the IDE.

There are a lot of things which are loaded but not very actively used during coding, like GoogleDrive/Dropbox/Box, Evernote/Joplin, Mail, Skype. It's tedious a bit to stop them it worth it, because you also reduce distractions. Lot of ppl feel FOMO though because not being connected...

I've noticed that even my iTerm2 hogs 0.5-1GB... Considering to switch to sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ because of that.

So while I agree that JetBrains IDEs might be a bit wasteful with memory, but so are all the other apps you use... Have you summed up ALL your browser processes' memory usage lately? You will be shocked. I'm battling that kind of waste with the github.com/tabwrangler/tabwrangler/ browser extension.