Is IntelliJ Too Heavy? A Comparison of IntelliJ IDEA and Emacs for Everyday Development
The author examines why heavyweight IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA strain low‑end laptops, compares performance, battery usage, and ergonomics with lighter editors such as Emacs, and discusses alternatives like Fleet, Eclipse, and VS Code, ultimately concluding that Emacs offers a more lightweight yet capable development experience.
IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a powerful tool that greatly eases developers' work, but the author experiences severe performance issues when running IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition on an older 2019 MacBook Air.
He questions whether IDEs are inherently too heavyweight for modest laptops, noting that even a high‑end Mac M1 with 64 GB RAM runs smoothly, while a weaker machine quickly becomes hot, noisy, and sluggish after about an hour of coding and testing.
The author reports similar problems on a Dell XPS 13 running Linux, with excessive fan noise and long indexing times that are unrelated to the programming language (Java, Groovy, Dart, Kotlin) or specific plugins.
He mentions disabling several plugins (WASM, Scala, Makefile, Clojure‑Kit, JMH, Gradle) after reporting issues to JetBrains, which mitigated but did not eliminate the problem.
Exploring alternatives, he notes JetBrains' upcoming lightweight editor Fleet, which still feels heavy due to sharing the same backend as IntelliJ, and dismisses Eclipse for its poor support of newer non‑JVM languages.
He also rejects VS Code, citing ergonomic shortcut issues, Electron‑based heaviness, and slower performance for his preferred languages.
Turning to Emacs, the author describes it as a legendary, highly extensible editor that, despite a steep initial learning curve and reliance on Lisp, provides powerful IDE‑like features via LSP, Magit, Org Mode, and various community distributions such as Spacemacs and Doom Emacs.
He highlights Emacs' ability to support many languages (Java, Go, C, Rust, Dart, Groovy, Common Lisp, Zig) with features like auto‑completion, inline documentation, code navigation, and test runners, though some conveniences (e.g., Java version configuration) still require extra steps compared to IntelliJ.
To answer whether Emacs is truly lighter, he conducted a 24‑hour battery‑usage test, recording screenshots that show IntelliJ rapidly draining the battery and generating high fan noise, whereas Emacs allowed the laptop to run for an entire day on a single charge with smoother temperature and fan behavior.
In his final thoughts, he concludes that Emacs is significantly lighter than modern IDEs while retaining essential features, urges JetBrains to consider these concerns, and acknowledges that Emacs, though community‑driven and sometimes lacking documentation, currently offers the best non‑professional solution for his workflow.
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