> Wouldn't it be better to make native application
Better in what way? The market has voted with their downloads, they don't agree that the problems with Electron apps are as bad as you feel that they are.
Better in what way? The market has voted with their downloads, they don't agree that the problems with Electron apps are as bad as you feel that they are.
And I still see native editors used more (for example latest StackOverflow survey, showed that Notepad++, Vim and Sublime combined are used much much more than VScode and Atom combined). I don't want't my editor to crush mid session, or have to write bunch of gulp files and npm commands to do one simple modification.
Maybe I don't have any 250MB files to open?
If VSCode doesn't fit your use case, don't use it. There are innumerable alternatives. But what purpose does it serve to tell the rest of us (who like it) that it sucks?
but hey, at least you can write code on a toaster oven, eh?
All joking aside -- I use VS Code on a 7 year old laptop, and it doesn't lag, or stutter at all. Performance is just fine. There comes a point where the hardware greatly outstrips the requirements to the point where it doesn't matter if the resources being used seem 'too much' for what it does.
I say this as an Emacs user.
I would, but it's still swapping back into RAM.
(For real though: yes, I use it all day)
That matters when I just want to do quick edits.
Vscode takes 3.
But I definitely don't ever recall it being 8 seconds, that feels like either an exaggeration or someone working on a potato.
Haha, no. It depends on what you use Emacs for. Remember the old joke about Emacs being a great OS? The reality is that Emacs is a great computing environment for almost anything that deals with text and even for some completely unrelated things. If you want a cross-platform GUI then Emacs Lisp may be one of the choices available.
This caused "plugins" - Elisp applications - to flourish and over the years a lot of code was written. Long story short, I have ~640000 (not a typo) lines of Elisp in my ~/.emacs.d/ alone, not counting the built-in Elisp libraries. It takes time to load that much code, even if it's byte-compiled beforehand.
The 1-2 second startup was slow enough that I couldn't even stay with the Emacs evil mode.
Admittedly this is a corporate laptop with all their virus crap running, so no editor is fast. But emacs in particular has very bad startup times for me.
To prove this, this command:
time emacs -Q --eval "(kill-emacs)"
My normal Emacs, just as yours, needs ~12 seconds to start up. But I made it this way by explicitly enabling and requiring things. I could, with some effort, get the time down to 5-8 seconds (byte-compilation and gathering autoloads in one place), and even back to around a second if I was desperate enough to try dumping the image of a running Emacs to disk (I did it once and succeeded, although the process wasn't pretty). I don't do this because I don't care that much, but the option is there.
There's plenty of competition in this area, so if electron-based text editors have enough downsides, people will use something native (as your comment indicates). If that wasn't the case, and we could only choose from electron text editors, then we would have a problem.
I think we should look at performance and resource usage as features on the same level as other features. Those things have to be balanced against whatever else the tool is bringing to the table.
I used Atom for a while. But as my projects got bigger, I got to the point where I was bothered by its slowness, crashes, and choking on large files (not even that large, honestly). I find sublime much better in these areas, so I switched. Looks like a healthy ecosystem to me!
> or example latest StackOverflow survey, showed that Notepad++, Vim and Sublime combined are used much much more than VScode and Atom combined
By this metric Notepad++ and Visual Studio (not Code) are the best editors because they topped out of every category (except Vim for Sysadmin / DevOps). If you look at the "Desktop Developers" tab, Visual Studio Code is actually in 3rd place behind Visual Studio and Notepad++. With Vim and Sublime a few rows down and Atom even further.
There's no way in hell Visual Studio (not Code) is faster than Vim, but how come it dominates it in all but one categories?
1 post found.
Oh, this comment.
You also appear to be falling into the developers are not users trap.
This all boils down to the art of "it's good enough". Take game development for an example. You could write an engine from scratch using Vulkan APIs and all that jazz and run at 144fps@4k on a toaster. Or, you know, you could trade off the performance and settle for just using Unity and optimizing wherever possible. It's not as fast, but as long as the user is not frustrated by it, who cares? You just saved a lot of development time. Tradeoffs, tradeoffs.
Same thing applies here. The VSCode team did a damn good job of keeping performance just about over the "good enough" threshold of most of its users, <flamebait>unlike other Electron based applications</flamebait>. Of course, that threshold varies based on the user and his machine, but outright dismissing VSCode based solely on the assumption that editors cannot be written in html+js is simply short-sighted.