Yea a few minutes is ridiculous. IntelliJ takes max 30s for me to start and it's pretty heavy, I can't imagine waiting more than a whole minute. That's just unacceptable.
Not to sound like a plug for Jetbrains, but for everything IntelliJ does, I find it incredible that it loads so quickly, and the experience is pretty much fluid. VS2008-2013, Eclipse, Netbeans, Qt Creator and others all seem like pigs compared to IntelliJ. The thing that really blew me away and made me a true convert was the jruby+ruby support, and the jruby step-through debugger
I don't know, VS loads pretty quickly and is generally fluid, though it has its shortcomings. Eclipse on the other hand starts up the same way it behaves: slowly. It's much more full-featured than VS or Qt Creator though (at least last time I tried it).
IntelliJ probably manages to do a lot more stuff in the background than its competitors do. I'd argue that concurrency / asynchronicity in large Java applications like that is very complicated, moreso than Javascript-based applications like Atom - so props to Jetbrains for that.
