With all the problems that we face, there are probably not many people here who want to pursue a career as a software developer, however I think we could try to create lists of all known-safe and eye-strain-causing IDEs. Of course, labelling them as such requires that you already have a perfect OS/GPU/display setup, and that only starting the IDE suddenly (for me, instantly) introduces eye strain.
I believe it is necessary to list OS, GPU, driver vendor (if for example there is both an open source and closed source driver), and possibly driver version, and the desktop environment. It may also be necessary to list the exact driver options used and the exact desktop environment options that could affect the video output.
For me it's like this:
OS: Debian 12 "bookworm" (stable), GPU: AMD Ryzen 5600G (integrated in the CPU), desktop environment: Xfce
GPU driver: AMDGPU; driver options (via xrandr): TearFree - on
Desktop environment settings: Xfce's compositing disabled, font antialiasing disabled
Usable IDEs (no eye strain at all, all day long):
- Eclipse
- Geany
- IDLE
- Everything running in the Xfce terminal (Vim, Neovim, etc.)
Unusable (strong eye strain after a few seconds):
- Intellij
- Visual Studio Code
Unfortunately, these two - two of the by far most popular ones - are totally unusable and other than (perhaps) using a virtual machine (yet to try, however the performance will suffer) there's no workaround in sight. The eye strain is there even when the IDEs don't use font antialiasing.
There are some IDEs I'm not sure about anymore, because it's been a while since I tried them. I will update the thread when I get new information. Please share your findings, too.