I have found most Idea performance issues are either, configured Java heap space, or indexing of project files that could be ignored.
The default memory settings are generally pretty conservative, some larger projects run into issues immediately.
If your system has plenty of ram to spare, I would recommend just giving it a few gig and seeing if things improve.
I don’t notice slowness on it personally. Maybe you are noticing the initial indexing it does. That doesn’t happen often with GoLand.
Make sure you enable Golang modules in the settings also.
Anyways just mentioning some stuff off the top of my head I enjoy:
Debugging is a great experience.
Can find a plugin for most anything, I use the Kubernetes one for syntax completion and documentation. (alt-q I think)
Also you can create .rest files and compose http requests and trigger them right in the files, which I thought was cool.
The documentation pop up by hitting alt-q in general is pretty cool. Don’t have to run over to godoc.
Then most things you’d expect from an advanced ide. Multi line editing... jump to definitions and implementations... Project wide code search and replacement
I'm not sure about Go's specific characteristics, but for PyCharm I love full project semanticly analyzed code navigation and remote step-through debugging. I use visual studio code for most JS stuff, but it's awful for wrangling many files simultaneously and learning a big codebase. Webstorm allows me to search for function calls and other things in the entire codebase much faster. I prefer VSCode's git UI and use both apps.
I can compare it with VSCode. Goland is much better at working with multiple Go Versions, which is a big thing in my daily work. Other things that it does better than VS Code are auto-generating unit tests, refactoring function signatures, better package management support, easier to set-up different build/debug profiles ...
Probably Sublime text. It's just too fast and I can't switch to anything else. I open heavier ones like Eclipse, VS Code etc. only when I need to refactor.
Here was a 3rd party analysis from 2015, showing a reduction in latency when editing XML files in IntelliJ IDEA from ~70ms with large jitter to 1.7ms with small jitter: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/#summary
I wonder if it's turned on by default today, 5 years later.
at least for JS, the refactoring tools save a lot of headache. write code before deciding on variable or function names and then one click to refactor everywhere in the codebase.