That used to be a problem for me on a polycarbonate macbook, it has been decent on a quad core i7 and 16GB of ram. If you have specific scenarios that are slow they will be happy to look at them. Jetbrains has always been responsive to the bugs I file, it is making me a little teary eyed.
My problem is that the computers I'd like to code on are not the ones I have to code on. At work, I have a computer that is from Q1 2009. It has an Intel dual core (pre "core i") CPU and 2 GB ram, and is running some kind of ancient Scientific Linux (based on CentOS). I also have some code on computers standing on the other side of the atlantic, into which I have to ssh, and then use vi over the net, which is horrible. My portable is a trusty old eeePC that, while great for writing/coding on the go, and doing office stuff, is really painful to use with a modern IDE.
That sucks of course, but it's not going to change soon since I'm a scientist, not a programmer (although I mainly program). And it's not just my university, but apparently a common problem in my field. The crappy state of PCs doesn't affect the runtime of our programs though. We're supposed to run most code on the Grid or on batch systems anyway, which usually have plenty of power. But it's really a problem for productivity, and I wonder what I would be able to do if we had similar resources like industrial programmers.
Btw. at home I have a desktop PC that I bought for gaming some time ago (Intel i5 2500, 8 GB ram, decent GPU, Hackintosh/Win7), and I find myself more and more bringing work home to run on it, because it outperforms anything I have in the lab. On that, of course I have no problem running any IDE I've tested.
That frankly sucks man. I view my computer as an extension of myself and not something my employer dictates. I have put SSDs, memory and extra monitors in all employer supplied equipment (and removed them when I left). If that isn't possible, I just use my own laptop / machines. As a scientist, your condition probably won't change on its own, you will always be 4 years behind, which is on the painful end of the curve for using current generation software.
If you can't upgrade your machines, then yes, downgrade your software so it runs at a reasonable speed. There has been a trend, and this is an extreme example, of people using DOS software like wordperfect and turbo c++ in an emulator on modern hardware to get blazingly fast full keyboard navigated apps.
I also have some code on computers standing on the other side of the atlantic, into which I have to ssh, and then use vi over the net, which is horrible
Have you tried using sshfs and then running an editor locally? Just don't use a GUI-based file manager on the mounted filesystem (esp. the OSX Finder.) :(
Yeah, this is what I used to do. There were some problems with file managers as you said, but it worked nicely in IDEs. Nowadays I only log in to that system to submit batch jobs every now and then, so it is not a big problem anymore.
> I'm a scientist, not a programmer (although I mainly program).
I guess it comes down to a good employer. My employer takes the view that a) give people the tools they need and b) developer time is expensive, computers are cheap in comparison.
