Curious, why not just used IntelliJ with the plugins for python?

I’ve never used the standalone apps. Do they provide a better experience?

Intellij IDEA only has the barest support for C/C++, whereas CLion is a full-featured IDE with similar feature to IDEA.

> I’ve never used the standalone apps. Do they provide a better experience?

In my experience there is no difference in terms of slowness, no. The standalone apps are usually just bundled with more features for the specific use case by default and in some cases they have features you can't readily get in just IDEA.

As far as I know, the standalones seem to work better with SDK and tool detection (I guess IntelliJ has to try to figure out which plugins to activate)

Some projects with mixed languages (like a Ruby backend, HTML/JS webapp) I've had to kick IntelliJ a bit to get it to cooperate and find tests correctly

Someone else mentioned CLion, I think Rider also has features you can't get via plugin (maybe there is no .NET plugin..?)

idk, i just assumed that pycharm would be optimized out of the box for python, so i never bothered with intelliJ

AFAIK IntelliJ with the Python plugin is basically the same as PyCharm.

I think it really depends on the language and project size. Any new project tends to make the IDE barely usable while it's indexing. Compared to, say, vi where everything is instant and there's no visual lag, I'd say it's slow. Even on 16 core CPU with 64GB of RAM and some IntelliJ JVM tuning, I still get some lag/stutter.