I've wrote a bit about this in https://matklad.github.io/2020/11/11/yde.html https://matklad.github.io/2020/11/11/yde.html Some specific things which IntelliJ

I've wrote a bit about this in https://matklad.github.io/2020/11/11/yde.html https://matklad.github.io/2020/11/11/yde.html Some specific things which IntelliJ brings to me: 1. Rich refactors -- things like "change signature" are a huge time saver in big codebases. LSP still can't do interactive refactors which require user input. 2. Structural Search Replace -- you can grep and sed sourcecode by matching on AST and semantic information. 3. Significantly more polished basic features. When I search for a thing in VS Code, I get a flat list of 20 occurrences. When I search for a thing in IntelliJ, I have 20 occurrences, but I immediately see that 12 come from tests, and, among the remaining 8, I can clearly identify 2 write and 6 reads, and it's writes I care about. 4. Significantly better integration with language specific tooling. When I want to run a custom command in VS Code, I open terminal and type `cargo run --package foo --bin bar`. In IntelliJ, I press a shortcut and get auto-completion not only for general cargo command, but for project specific things as well (eg, IntelliJ knows that `foo` package exists and completes that). 5. Local history -- rather than maintaining a hard-to-visualize and unintuitive undo-tree, IntelliJ transparently remembers all transient version of a file and shows you a fine-grained "git log" with diffs and such. 6. Merge tool that understands semantics of the language and can resolve a lot more conflicts automatically (though, to be fair, the actual Git interface still is not as good as magit) 7. A lot of polished "small things". IntelliJ helps a lot with adding punctuation, placing the cursor in the right position and doing other small editing tasks. Subjectively, it significantly reduces the cognitive load for just typing the code in. I guess, the overall thing here is not so much as some big, flashy things, but rather than a myriad of small, polished details. Like vim has a dedicated command/keysequence for anything, IntelliJ exploits any semantic information it can get from the sourcecode to be helpful.