Best of JetBrains — April 2026

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   Article

   JetBrains·2w

   The Road to Responsive IntelliJ-Based IDEs

   JetBrains details a multi-year engineering effort to improve UI responsiveness in IntelliJ-based IDEs by moving write actions off the UI thread (EDT). The platform's 25-year-old architecture relied on a single read-write lock tightly coupled to the EDT, causing freezes when expensive write actions (like VFS refresh or PSI rebuilding) blocked the UI. The team introduced background write actions, a new cancelable lock, modality-aware locking, and incremental migration strategies to preserve plugin compatibility. Results show the expected share of UI time spent on write locks dropped from 1.83% to 0.53% between releases 2025.2 and 2025.3. Future work targets eliminating write-intent locking from common interactions like typing.

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2. 2
   Article

   JetBrains·2w

   Speeding up interactive rebase in JetBrains IDEs

   JetBrains engineers implemented an in-memory interactive rebase optimization for JetBrains IDEs, reducing execution time from tens of seconds to a few seconds on large repositories like the IntelliJ monorepo. Instead of checking out commits sequentially and updating the working tree and index, the IDE now uses Git plumbing commands (git cat-file, git commit-tree, git merge-tree, git update-ref) to rebuild commit chains entirely in memory. If a merge conflict is detected, it falls back to the standard Git rebase. The optimization covers reword, drop, squash, and extract-to-separate-commit operations. EAP telemetry confirmed consistent improvements across macOS, Windows, and Linux, with ~12% of rebases encountering conflicts that trigger the fallback. The feature ships by default in the 2026.1 release.

   16
3. 3
   Article

   Laravel News·5w

   PhpStorm 2026.1 Released

   JetBrains has released PhpStorm 2026.1 with a broad set of improvements. Key highlights include Laravel 13, Livewire, and Filament framework support, new Route Search UI, and better Eloquent method handling. PHP 8.5 pipe operator quick-fixes and improved generics type inference are also included. The built-in MCP server now exposes IDE actions to third-party agents like Claude Code and Windsurf, and a Laravel Idea MCP integration is available. AI features include Next Edit Suggestions and the new Junie CLI beta coding agent. Testing improvements cover PHPUnit attribute navigation and Pest test runner enhancements. Developer experience gains include Git worktree support, terminal completion for Git/Docker/kubectl, native Wayland support on Linux, and automatic exclusion of framework-generated directories from indexing. On the frontend side, TypeScript now uses a service-powered type engine by default, with added support for React compiler directives, Vue 3.1.8, Angular 21.x, and modern CSS color functions. Code With Me collaboration service is being sunset after this release.

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