Hacker News Reader

Comment by kbd | Hacker News Reader

Every time Atom is discussed, it's pointed out how slow it is, and then others point out how VS Code is much faster yet is also based on Electron. Could someone explain what makes VS Code significantly faster?

Full disclosure: Every time I try Atom I decide to stick with Sublime Text, largely because Atom feels slow. I've never tried VS Code myself.

View on HN

Why haven't you tried VS Code? Relatively small download, fast install, free and open source. You could install it in just a little more time than it takes to post this question. https://code.visualstudio.com/

Disclaimer: I work for m-dollar. My commission rate is 0.0% and VS Code is free, so I am hoping to make it up in volume.

Kudos to the humour in your disclaimer :)

I love VS Code and have been using it as my main editor for quite a while now, but the lack of project-wide find and replace is why I still keep Atom around:

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/1690

This glaring omission combined with the proposed performance improvements in the Atom 1.9 beta might just be enough to tempt me back to the Atom side again.

The thing that stops me from giving VS Code a real shot is its sad VIM mode.

I tried VS Code. I liked it. But I really miss project-wide find and replace. Hope it will be added soon.

Atom and VS Code only share the Electron environment, but the actual way they've implemented the editor rendering and interaction is completely different. Basically, all that VS Code shows is that it's not the JS/Chrome environment that's the bottleneck, it's the editor implementation itself.

There's some discussion in this Atom ticket: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/10188

In my experience, Sublime is vastly faster than both. VS Code comes next, and then Atom.

I still wouldn't switch to VS code because by design[1] you can't open multiple folders in the same window, which destroys my workflow.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/30234987/5905344

Sublime is already slow as hell for me. (I open a lot of logs)

I can't imagine going any slower...

Atom can't open files larger than 2MB IIRC, and files below 2MB are.. very rough. This was about 6 months ago, though, so hopefully it's improved since then!

EDIT: yep, things have improved: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/307

It still struggles with large files. I can crash atom at work often. Never managed to crash vs code. But vs code still lacks plugins. As does sublime nowadays.

Oddly enough, about 2/3 of the times I come back to my work computer in the morning, VS Code is unresponsive and needs to be killed. (Yes, I should get together enough data to make a bug report out of this.)

But, yuck, sounds like I should keep using VS Code anyway. I kind of want to be able to use Atom, but 2 MB is a frighteningly low size limit.

Open a file with everything on one line in Atom, and you can bring it to its knees, even if the file is only a couple of kilobytes.

Just flat-out more efficient code may have a lot to do with it (I have not deeply explored the codebase for either project). However, I suspect that the larger reason is that Atom ships with a ton of plugins enabled by default, whereas VS Code ships relatively lean.

If you look the settings in Atom, it tells you specifically how many milliseconds each plugin adds to startup time. They REALLY add up. Install even more plugins to customize your editor, and it rapidly enters IDE bloat territory.

All that being said, VS Code recently launched a plugin marketplace of its own. I've installed Vim emulation and a couple of others, and really haven't noticed any increase in startup time.

Another one to try is Howl (http://howl.io)

It's newish but very stable and uses Lua (not Javascript) as the extension language. It is very lightweight and faster than Atom.

Disclosure: I'm one of the contributors.

This looks cool; kind of like modern Vim/Emacs hybrid. I especially like the filename search, which is lacking in Atom.

Thank you. Yes it's kind of like a modernized Emacs with a very nice API in Lua. I haven't used Vim so can't say about the similarity there but it does have a Vim mode.

Do you mean the normal file browser or the recursive search (`ctrl_s`)? I did find Atom a bit lacking for general quick file browsing as well as previewing and usability of things like replace commands.

I mean the ability to list all files recursively in a buffer and then search that buffer, something Emacs got right.

Ah yes - I find that really useful too!

Do you know how Emacs handles too many recursive listings? Howl just truncates the search after 3 seconds and I'm wondering if there's something better we can do.

This looks really nice. I'm gonna try to compile on OSX, shouldn't be too hard. It seems to be a modern vim/emacs with no bloated GUI, and I'm surprised by the relatively small number of LoC!

Thanks! See this comment for instructions on how to build on OSX (or what worked last time :)

https://github.com/howl-editor/howl/issues/68#issuecomment-1...

I used Atom for a while then switched to VSCode. Atom always felt a little "wrong" after Sublime. It works perfectly but there is this feeling of heaviness on all interfaces, scrolling etc.

VSCode works great, completely replaced both Atom and Sublime for me. Give it a shot sometime.

I've also found the font rendering on OS X to be better (sharper/cleaner) in Sublime than Atom on a retina display.

I know it doesn't add much, but ditto... I love VS Code as an editor... I work in Linux, OSX and Windows on pretty much a daily basis, having the same editor everywhere is a really nice thing. Freshly updated, and the plugin ecosystem keeps growing... even debugger support (that I've never actually used).

Latest update added an on-screen terminal view, which is definitely useful for a quick npm install, etc. Some of the "solution" stuff is a little clunky to get setup for a full project, but it's interesting the approach MS is taking on this compared to classic VS. Hoping it gets a bit better on integrated project tooling for the likes of getting some of the boilerplate setup. Seems that go, python, C#, JS and TS are very well supported (out of the box or via extensions).

I wonder if the major Atom users are working with nicer repos than those who lament that they can't use it. The ideal project would maybe be a max of 3 or 4 levels deep (but fewer in most part) with 5-20 folders/files in each folder, and most files less than 200 lines and all less than 1000 lines. A lot of repos are not like this though - they have too much crap in them.

Electron is the Chrome UI embedding shell. The actual editor code is totally different between the two.

Yes, I get that, but because they're both based on Electron, they're essentially both browsers and will do all their rendering through DOM manipulation. Yet VS Code is reported to be much better at it than Atom, so I was wondering what architectural differences account for this.

It seems there's some dramatic differences in how plugins are integrated, meaning some things are easier/harder to do via plugin. The VS Code UI is much more fixed than Atom as well... that said, other than getting used to the open files on the upper corner instead of tabs, it hasn't been bad at all. It's just out of the way enough.

> Could someone explain what makes VS Code significantly faster?

I'm wondering the same every time someone writes VS Code is faster than Atom (which is true in my experience): yes, but why?

For one I understand that Atom just uses Regex to highlight syntax for languages. I'd be surprised if VS doesn't use a proper parser.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com