Comment by StreakyCobra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by StreakyCobra | Hacker News Reader

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> 10x faster and 10x more memory/battery efficient editor?

Except for the startup time --- with which I can live with --- I never felt a difference in speed between native text editors ans VSCode. There is one, but I don't notice it. Human are much more slower than computers, so as long as it is not taking more time that I need to notice it, I don't care.

Nowadays my computer has enough memory so I can afford to not care about the 116M that VSCode is currently using, especially in regard to what my browser consumes, and in regards of the wide range of features it offers.

Battery could be problematic indeed, but before looking at my text editor, I would probably first switch from KDE to i3, and then use a lightweight web browser. This would impact it much more than my text editor.

> If a native editor just gave you a webview that can run JS extensions...

But then you start loosing all the benefits of faster/memory/battery points you mentioned.

Anyway, I'll happily try something like this if you develop it ;-)

> Battery could be problematic indeed, but before looking at my text editor, I would probably first switch from KDE to i3, and then use a lightweight web browser. This would impact it much more than my text editor.

This item is about VS Code consuming 13 % CPU when idle, which is bigger than the difference in idle CPU between KDE and i3 (if you don't have fancy widgets, it's about ~nil).

Indeed, this bug is pretty nasty for the battery. I don't have it though, so my remark was about non-buggy battery usage. Web-based text editors consumes more battery, but the difference is not significant from my point of view.

>Except for the startup time --- with which I can live with --- I never felt a difference in speed between native text editors and VSCode. There is one, but I don't notice

Try editing anything larger than a simple program file (from a large JSON to a CSV as devs often do) and you'll do. Try hex editing a large binary. And many other tasks.

Sooner this evening I had to open a 144'000 lines CSV file, 3.5MB. This is not big, but it is the kind of file I have to open from time to time for my work. No noticeable delay to open the file in VSCode, the cursor moves smoothly, and scrolling with the minimap through the whole 144'000 lines is also smooth. The VIM plugin for VSCode start to have troubles over 10M it seems, but if I have to edit files bigger than this I can open them with spacemacs anyway. I spend most of my time in small text files like Python, CSV or Makfiles, so this is not a problem. Of course if you have other requirements, like you are passing a lot of time in big files, then VSCode is not the correct tool.

I would suggest you to try VSCode for curiosity, if you have not done it yet. You could be surprised. Maybe it is not the right tool for you, but it is quite well made, and compared to atom, bracket or other web-based text editor, it feels like a supersonic jet.

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