No idea what you're talking about, Intellij family is light years ahead of competition. It will take decades of them stagnating, and their competition moving really fast, to become uncompetitive.
Local history. Diff tool. Refactoring. Smart completions. And it just works out of the box, without extensions that may work or not, depending on how the maintainer finds time for updating.
vscode has all of those except for local history. You can argue that intelij does it better but that just a subjective opinion. Even when it's true that is just doing things slightly better, in no way "light year ahead", with a major downsize of being a jvm resource hog. Even electron apps perform better. I've never had to wait for vscode running index on a project.
Vscode is actually "light year ahead" across the board with newer/niche languages like rust or ocaml. They invented LSP which makes supporting new languages way easier without compromising intelligence.
Nsonha your point is right about vscode being better for niche languages.
Now if you use a mainstream programming language, intellij is light years away and not realizing it is proof of ignorance. It would be too long to list all of what intellij has to offer feature wise. The insanely huge amount of static analysis for improving your code quality is a sufficient example.
The VCS integration, the semantic highlighting, all the kind of hints, of visualization, their better autocompletion, refactorings and so on.
I extensively used vscode before and intellij changed my life, it make programming better and easier.
To show you the order of magnitude difference: let's compare the commits count:
Vscode has 72000 commits.
Intellij community edition has 295000 commits
Now realize that intellij ultimate edition probably has gotten twice that amount of human resources.
The performance is the worth it downside, and it is improving at each release, I'm on early adopter versions (which are free btw with premium features) + use prebuilt indexes and I can finally begin to say that most of the time idea feel fast (on a 4 years old ThinkPad)
I do use intellij just in a limited way, just don't see it sorry. "VCS integration" & "semantic highlighting" are just basic stuff eveyone has so idk why you bring those up. I rarely use any VCS integration other than diff and merge so even if there is none at all I'm fine with cli. However vscode has a very powerful 3rd party extension for git (git lenses) that has more features than intelij built-in, and the built-in support for github is built by the github team themselves so that's worth something.
"all the kind of hints": I don't think this is the job of an IDE, this is something that linters do very well and I trust them more than I trust a software that tries to do all things under the sun. Take python for example, vscode has support for 8 or so popular linters and will populate useful hints if you intstall one or even many of them. So you have both power and choices.
It may have better autocomplete for some language (I doubt typescript) or refactoring but those are things I don't really care about that much. I've used those in kotlin & scala, their support seem nice but the hints and refactoring didn't blow my mind or anything.
