Hacker News Reader

Comment by JonnieCache | Hacker News Reader

I was about to try one of these fancy new browser based editors again, but now I'm confused. Shouldn't opening a directory be O(1)? I just opened the chromium trunk in sublime and it took 0.2 seconds, regardless of whether it was currently running or not.

Why would one ever use a text editor that has perceptible latency when doing everyday tasks?

3 seconds isn't even latency, it's a freeze tbh.

View on HN

I feel we are comparing apple to oranges here: sublime (a text editor) will simply list files & directories in the top level folder when you add a folder to the projects while an IDE (thinking mostly of Eclipse here, but I assume other IDEs aren't that different) will parse every single file to build ASTs, symbol lookup tables and all these things that you either love or cannot stand.

With ST3 we scan and index symbols in each file contained in folders that have been opened. This powers our project-wide Goto Symbol functionality and the Symbol Definition popup.

VS Code (a "smart" text editor not to be confused with Visual Studio an IDE) doesn't parse C++ code (which is what Chromium consists off) in the default configuration. And even if you have the C++ extension enabled it doesn't parse any code until later.

I don't think being "browser based" as the reason that opening a directory is slow. A lot of traditional IDEs (cough Visual Studio cough) also have similar problems. I think they're doing a bunch of work (e.g. caching all subdirectories and files) but aren't doing it concurrently with the UI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com