VS Code's interface is nearly identical to Sublime's, with some nice sugar in places that are helpful (optional GUI for keybindings and extensions).
For debugging and version control VS Code's interface OOTB is leaps and bounds above Sublime's.
>VS Code takes up 235 MB
Meh I have 16GB of RAM on my old computer. Or do you actually just mean HDD space? Who cares about 200MB in that regard?
>Who cares about 200MB in that regard? Who cares about anything? Just use everything you have. CPU, RAM, battery life and so on. These things are free for the developer.
Is VS Code actually seven times better and/or complex compared to Sublime Text that it actually needs to use the additional disk space.
Electron is garbage and just an exercise in providing a bad user experience to people for the sake of making front-end developers happy since they're the ones making them. The end result is bloated applications that are slow and use way too much system resources. VS Code used to use a significant portion (>10%) of the CPU just to draw a blinking cursor.
It may not be the ultimate solution to the problem with regards to things such as performance, but these are irrelevant if the application were to never be built in the alternative.
I can see why you might call them "poor text editors", probably based on real or perceived performance issues.
But I don't see why "bad interfaces"...
I believe Intellisense is VScode's best differentiator. It provides very good autocomplete.
How do you set up this very good autocomplete? The official Python plugin (by Don Jayamanne) seems kind of bad at autocomplete and related features. I get autocomplete that:
- Autocompletes random stuff because I pressed "enter" or "down"
- Tries to autocomplete comments
- If I tell it to autocomplete only on tab, then it will sometimes autocomplete and sometimes insert spaces; the faster I type, the more I get spaces
- Pops up enormous tooltips for function docstrings that are taller than my entire code window
I used to prefer lean editors (vim, Sublime), but then intellisense and plugins of VS Code won me over. That and git support and other niceties working out of the box.
They're not poor editors. They're okay. And the interface is fine, I've actually grown to like Atom after having used it for a month. They are they're at least an order a magnitude bigger and slower than Sublime Text, yet pretty usable on a modern desktop computer. I've also used Sublime Text for three or four years on a daily basis.