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Comment by shawnz | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunate that you're being downvoted because the slow start time of VS code is honestly such a big blocker that it outweighs most of these features for me. I just can't wait 10 seconds every single time I want to take a note.

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Is it really an issue? I think I start my editor only when I do the update and I have to reset my mac.

I am on a fairly RAM constrained workstation (4GB) so I have no choice but to close it when I'm not using it. Otherwise I'll spend just as long swapping as I would opening a new instance.

I don't think a machine with just 4GB of RAM can be considered a 'workstation'.

Ouch! It's not much, but it's mine.

Are you running Windows? Could put *nix on it, reduce the amount of crap running in the background and pick a low-memory shell?

The biggest consumer of RAM for me is chrome, not windows, and it is basically essential to my development process to have it open all the time. So I worry an OS change would not produce an appreciable enough performance improvement to justify changing my whole workflow over.

Is Chromium on Linux a suitable alternative for your development workflow?

Rude

What is your workflow like that a few second delay is a major blocker?

I used to feel the same way early in my career. Now I don’t feel the need to be in a rush all the time.

I've seen some people make the argument that they want to use their editor for quick edits to single files, which is a fine use-case. However, VS Code is really not designed to be optimized for that case. It's really about editing code (hence the name) as opposed to quick edits to configs, etc.

It's usually best if one knows a few different tools designed for different scenarios. Right tool for the job.

At the same time though, it is purposely not positioned to replace a full-blown IDE. So what is the use case that it's optimized for? Why does it offer to add an "open with code" context menu item to every file if it's not expected that you'll be using it for quick edits on individual files?

I leave vscode open basically 100% of the time and use notepad++ for quick edits. Vscode having slow startup doesn't affect my support of it at all

It's not so much a professional issue as a personal one. When I get an idea and want to start taking some notes, a 10 second delay is more than enough time for me to get side-tracked by the details. So I skip VS code and open notepad instead, in the interest of getting the idea out as soon as possible. And as the complexity of the project starts to increase to the point where VS code's more advanced functionality might actually come in useful, there just never seems to be a good time to stop what I'm doing and change editors.

Do you mean notepad++, or just notepad?

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