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Heidi was the default option on our work machines a few years ago and it’s one of the buggiest pieces of software I’ve ever used.

Does it still lock up the entire UI if a query takes longer than five seconds to return results? Does it still pop up exception dialogs every ten minutes when it’s been open for longer than a few hours?

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HeidiSQL has its quirks and occasional rough edges, but it's certainly simpler and more straightforward to use than DBeaver, the other common free SQL client that is sometimes recommended.

I prefer Heidi where the DB setup allows it, and use DBeaver as a backup.

Using DBeaver and its also not without problems. Lots of popup dialogs that we cannot stop. But ti does not constantly crash or lock up.

This is my exact experience with DBeaver. Absolutely cannot stop all the frustrating popups. Finally got fed up and started using vim+dadbod and while the experience is a bit less batteries-included, I was mostly just using DBeaver to run raw SQL anyway, and have been on vim for over a decade so that's an option for me. Now my SQL queries live in per-project versioned files instead of some eclipse project folder somewhere and I can edit them with all the power of vim which speeds up my workflows.

But nobody's going to do this without being a huge vim nerd, so I recognize it's not a general alternative.

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