Best for

Developers who like IntelliJ's keymap and tool windows but want faster startup and far less memory.

Why it deserves attention

OpenIDEA recreates the IntelliJ IDEA way of working, including its keymap, tool windows, and search-everywhere habits, in a native app with a Rust core. It bundles an editor, code insight, debugger, Git, terminal, database and HTTP clients, and language support for more than 60 languages across macOS, Windows, and Linux. Its own benchmark on a 770-file Python project reports 1.1 seconds to ready and 169 MB of memory against 13.2 seconds and 2 GB for IntelliJ IDEA, though the project notes that IDEA performs deeper analysis. It is Apache-2.0 with about 5,700 GitHub stars and is still early: plugin compatibility, refactoring depth, and framework support do not yet match JetBrains, so teams with heavy IDEA plugin workflows should test before switching.

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Can replace

IntelliJ IDEA
VS Code

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