The gap it fixes

Born from real, independent, recent (2026-02) evidence in JetBrains Marketplace reviews of Better Highlights (1.03M downloads, FREEMIUM) — not the raw aggregate rating, which is contaminated by unrelated products sharing the word "better", but the actual review text once filtered:

Multiple independent reports of IDE freezes on macOS, GoLand, and PyCharm: "IntelliJ freezes while analyzing source code. Disabling the plugin restores normal functionality" and "PyCharm application may become unresponsive, and the only solution is to force quit it."
The competitor's own changelog admits the same root cause three releases in a row without fully fixing it: "(Bug Fix) Move slow checks out of EDT thread to decrease amount of freezes" (2025.3.2, 2025.3.3, 2025.3.4).
A Freemium-tier complaint: "Many settings are silently disabled... blocker to me... features as simple as moving inlay hints to the RIGHT" and "I hate that I cannot disable Cognitive Complexity. Even after unchecking all checkboxes all code is underlined."

Facts and pricing

Category: Code Quality
Pricing: Free
Platform: IntelliJ-family plugin
First published: 2026-08-04
Marketplace ID: #33169
Repository: highlight-companion
Growth: ▲ +98.3% since 2026-08-18 (58→115)

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Download and star counts as of 2026-10-18, refreshed twice daily from the JetBrains Marketplace and GitHub APIs.