The Evolution of WSL Support in JetBrains IDEs - The JetBrains Blog

JetBrains is standardizing WSL project support around a new Native mode, recommended from version 2026.2 for IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm, and PhpStorm, in which the IDE remains a Windows application while a lightweight IJent agent operates inside WSL to handle Linux files and processes. Earlier approaches had notable drawbacks: 9P filesystem access and WSL-specific command handling caused latency, poor throughput, antivirus-related slowdowns, and symlink issues; WSLg provided an unsupported Linux GUI workaround with integration limitations; and Remote Development placed the backend in WSL but required a large installation and incurred ongoing client-server synchronization costs. IJent, written in Rust and using portable stdio or faster Hyper-V sockets, executes operations with correct Linux filesystem semantics and avoids reliance on 9P, while EelApi abstracts local and remote environments for IDE code and plugins across WSL, Docker, and Dev Containers. Benchmarking a large Spring project showed Native mode reduced ready-to-work time by 38%, project-tree scanning by 54%, file-content reads by 53%, and indexing time by 22% compared with 9P, although small projects showed no measurable difference.

No tracked trend matches for this post yet.

Use this post, company, and trend context to find content marketing opportunities, perform competitive analysis, or address product feature gaps via the Plushcap MCP server or the Plushcap API.