[shadowmint]

Sounds like you've never used a jet brains product before. Seriously, it's worth a download just to play with even if you only do it for ten minutes and then throw it away.

You may be surprised at how much of a productivity boost it is (and yes, intelliJ can be slow; but it's nothing like as rubbish as visual studio).

[gchp]

I use PyCharm quite a bit, and I find it great. To me though slowness is a big issue. I often switch back and forth to vim, and occasionally find the slowness of pycharm quite jarring. Had I not been using vim, perhaps I would not have noticed, but it does have quite an impact at first.

Their autocomplete is second to none, however. And once that has parsed the codebase it is lightning fast. Definitely recommend giving it a try.

[philjohn]

I was suffering slowness in PHPStorm, but I've disabled all of the plugins that I wasn't using (mostly things like support for frameworks I don't use) and it's now much more responsive.

[x0x0]

more ram (and make sure the jvm is allowed to use it)

Deep inside I wonder if the ram usage isn't wasteful, but then I use "find usages" in a medium sized python codebase and I'm just happy pycharms saved me 30+ minutes of poking through code. I found it a big productivity boost.