Someone Rebuilt the IntelliJ IDEA Workflow in Rust, and It Opens Projects in Under a Second
You know the feeling. You double-click your IDE, and then you wait. And wait. The window appears, but the project tree is still spinning up, your CPU fan has opinions, and somewhere a Java process is eating two gigabytes of RAM just to say hello. What if you could keep the workflow you've spent years building muscle memory around—the keymap, the tool windows, the search-everything reflex—without the startup tax? That's the bet behind OpenIDEA, an IDE that rebuilds the IntelliJ IDEA way of working on top of a Rust core.
What It Does
OpenIDEA is a native desktop IDE that brings the IntelliJ IDEA way of working to a Rust-based application. That means the keymap you already know, the tool windows you're used to, and the search-everything habits you've built—all in a native app rather than a JVM one. It ships with an editor, code insight, a debugger, Git integration, a terminal, database tools, and HTTP clients, with support for 60+ languages.
It builds for macOS, Windows, and Linux, and it's built on Tauri—which explains the pnpm tauri dev command in the build instructions and the Rust, Node 22, and pnpm prerequisites. The project is Apache 2.0 licensed, and the README is careful to note it's not affiliated with JetBrains (IntelliJ IDEA is a JetBrains trademark).
Why It's Cool
The headline here is the benchmark, and it's worth looking at closely because it's the whole pitch. Opening freqtrade (a Python project of about 770 files) with warm caches, median of five runs:
- Window with the project: 0.9 seconds versus 3.1 seconds for IDEA 2026.2.3.
- Ready (CPU settled): 1.1 seconds versus 13.2 seconds.
- Memory (USS, all processes): 169 MB versus 2011 MB.
- CPU time until ready: 2.4 seconds versus 47.9 seconds.
- Quit: 0.3 seconds versus 5.9 seconds.
To the project's credit, the README doesn't hide the caveat: IDEA analyses Python more deeply, so "ready" doesn't mean the same work on both sides. That's an honest thing to put in your own benchmark table, and it matters—this isn't a claim that OpenIDEA does everything IDEA does, faster. It's a claim that the workflow can feel the same while the machine underneath is dramatically lighter. Both sides were measured from the outside, the same way, and there's a perf/compare directory so you can run the comparison on your own machine and projects rather than taking the table on faith.
The other thing worth appreciating is the scope. A lot of "fast alternative editor" projects stop at text editing. OpenIDEA is aiming at the full working environment—debugger, Git, terminal, database and HTTP clients, 60+ languages—which is a much harder target than a lean text editor. Whether it delivers on all of that is something you'd have to test yourself, but the ambition is clearly to replace your daily driver, not supplement it.
How to Try It
The easiest path is to grab a build from the releases page. If you'd rather build from source, you'll need Rust 1.96, Node 22, pnpm, and the Tauri prerequisites:
pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev
If you want to run the notebook execution tests (they're opt-in), you'll need two distinct Python environments with ipykernel installed:
OPENIDEA_TEST_PYTHON=/first/env/bin/python \
OPENIDEA_TEST_PYTHON_SECOND=/second/env/bin/python \
cargo test -p ide-notebook --test kernel_runtime -- --ignored --test-threads=1
And if you want to reproduce the benchmark numbers yourself, the repo has a perf/compare directory for that. Everything lives at github.com/l0ng-ai/openidea.
Final Thoughts
OpenIDEA is most interesting to developers who like how IDEA works but have grown tired of what it costs to run—especially on laptops where 2 GB of RAM and a 13-second warm-up are a real tax. The honest caveat is that the benchmark compares different depths of analysis, so treat the numbers as a starting point, not a verdict. Run the comparison on your own projects and see how it feels. If the workflow really does carry over, that's a trade-off worth exploring.