Products · Product
WebStorm
Raised as a usability problem by 36 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2012–2026), in 35 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
- 1
Every issue, all time, most people first
IDE slow and unresponsive across projectsUnreviewed
20122026- IDE becomes slow and unresponsive, with slowdowns across projects despite tweaks2021-07-01
- IDE has become virtually unusable due to performance problems on OS X2021-04-19
- Sluggish performance makes the IDE hard to use on a 2019 MacBook Pro2020-12-30
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 38 complaints
- Becomes completely unusable on medium-sized React projects2026-09-22
- Config mixes actual settings with transient state, constantly changing XML format2026-09-02
- Became progressively slower, unusable even on small projects2026-07-23
- Editor locks for 3-4 seconds when scrolling larger files2026-05-19
- Suggestion popup takes 10-15 seconds, so user types names manually2026-05-18
- Laggy, bloated UI and autocomplete unreliable during constant indexing2025-06-23
- Reformatting on save hangs for 10+ seconds on a tiny file until cancelled2025-04-30
- Autocomplete popup sometimes freezes the IDE completely, causing data loss when killed2025-01-24
- Waits 10-15 seconds for feedback on code changes in a large project2024-10-24
- IDE's find usages misses some usages even within the same project2024-09-03
- Code indexing freezes the computer for several minutes2024-06-28
- WebStorm intermittently loses highlighting and typechecking, working much worse than on Linux2023-10-13
- IDE offers no autocomplete for store state fields, so users must guess names2022-07-03
- IDE becomes slow and unresponsive, with slowdowns across projects despite tweaks2021-07-01
- IDE has become virtually unusable due to performance problems on OS X2021-04-19
- Sluggish performance makes the IDE hard to use on a 2019 MacBook Pro2020-12-30
- IDE slowed to a crawl, becoming unusable over time2020-11-06
- IDE feels sludgy and slow to respond compared to VSCode2020-05-18
- Keyboard shortcuts are meaningless key combinations that are hard to remember2020-04-20
- Non-native open/save dialogs and a weaker file browser make it feel less normal2020-04-06
- Stepping over a line takes about 10 seconds in large projects, making debugging unusable2019-12-15
- Slow, occasionally buggy, and has a horrid user experience2018-07-22
- Search Everywhere dialog sometimes fails to receive focus, hurting productivity2017-11-06
- IDE becomes unbearably slow and inspections fail with modern ES6, Vue, Webpack setup2017-09-21
- IDE lags behind typing and is slow to start and respond2017-05-18
- Felt too sluggish and obnoxious to use over several tries2017-04-12
- Settings are behind a horrible modal dialog, harder to change than editing files2017-02-23
- Up to 2000ms delay before visual feedback on typing2017-02-23
- Many features enabled by default, users must adjust before getting productive2016-12-15
- Very slow and froze twice on an older MacBook Pro2016-12-15
- Slow and laggy to interact with on OS X2016-12-15
- Machine becomes almost unusable while indexing large projects, forcing the user to wait2016-12-15
- Couldn't find ESLint plugin in settings; it was buried six or seven menus deep2016-03-17
- TypeScript highlighting is often invalid and breaks again after each fix2014-02-28
- Sprawling settings menus make simple editor features hard to tweak correctly2014-02-19
- Editor runs very slowly with a 12k-line JavaScript file open, making editing impractical2013-11-12
- Scrollbar hidden until hovered, so user can't see position or quickly grab it2012-04-27
- Listing object members after typing a dot is very slow2012-02-04