For me its because they do a really good job of keeping the UI snappy and responsive. This is pretty impressive considering:

1) Its a java app

2) Continuously running compilers/interpreters in the background

3) Running builds and tests can be bursty and its pretty good about not hanging when that happens.

I'd been a Visual Studio user for I think over a decade, and was really, really sick of listening to my laptop fans whining the whole time, and frequent freeze-ups. Every new version promised better performance, and never delivered - VS's poor (and unreliable) performance is the main thing that made me try Rider, and what performance revelation it was!

> VS's poor (and unreliable) performance is the main thing that made me try Rider, and what performance revelation it was!

VS 2019 is actually as fast or faster than Rider for me. But that is without Resharper, and without it, I miss way too much functionality.

I've used VS with ReSharper for many years, because ReSharper adds so much to it

That said, before I pulled the trigger and purchased a Rider license, I tried running VS without ReSharper. While it certainly was definitely faster, more responsive and used less memory, I still didn't find it as snappy as Rider. It also still had my laptop fans whining, and occasionaly became completely unresponsive.

It's a real shame - Visual Studio is without doubt an excellent IDE, but performance and reliability issues have plagued it since forever. I really wish a serious effort would be made to address these.

snappy and responsive is not what comes to my mind when thinking about JetBrains products.

I do think they have really good products, just a little ... slow.

FWIW I find IDEA more responsive (fewer random lags while typing) than my pretty minimal emacs setup. Text editors like vim, kakoune, or xi are snappy, are not IDEs.

I suppose I meant snappy and responsive relative to Eclipse. Early 2000's java development was dominated by eclipse and netbeans. I used Eclipse in college and the difference between Eclips & Intellij was night and day.

They’ve gotten a lot better recently. If you haven’t tried in a while may be time to revisit. Particularly if you’re on MacOS, where they used to have serious issues.