I disagree they're straight-up ugly, but they're certainly cluttered, and I think there's a very simple reason for that: IntelliJ (or VisualStudio, or Xcode, o

I disagree they're straight-up ugly, but they're certainly cluttered, and I think there's a very simple reason for that: IntelliJ (or VisualStudio, or Xcode, or anything in this class) is an expert tool. Expert tools can be insanely complex to use, and can have very steep learning curves, because the people who use them are willing and able to invest the time. In exchange, the tools assume that most users are going to want to customize the living daylights out of their tooling. This means that really good IDEs like IntelliJ, Visual Studio, etc., can optimize for two separate extremes. On the one hand, it almost doesn't matter how cluttered they are, because experts are going to customize them to look exactly how they want anyway. On the other hand, they pack so much functionality that they face a very real problem of people not even knowing what's there in the first place. (E.g., did you know you can debug any browser's JavaScript directly from IntelliJ? I sure didn't until surprisingly recently, but apparently that's been there for quite some time.) So there's also a mode that displays all the things that the IDE can possibly do, and you're completely correct that that mode looks borderline unusable. Honestly, as long as the clutter is done sanely, I'm okay with it. I frequently toggle between just-the-code and all-the-things when I'm in IntelliJ, and the recent No Distraction mode makes doing that a lot simpler. If I know a keyboard shortcut, awesome. If I don't, I have the shortcuts for all the panes hardwired, so at least I can quickly browse the 25 buttons that show up, immediately discard the 15 I recognize, and quickly find which of the remaining 10 actually does what I want. I'm not going to argue this is the most elegant or most efficient, but I'm not convinced it's a horrible trade-off, either.