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Comment by morganvachon | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a developer but I use an advanced text editor (Notepad++ on Windows, Geany on everything else) for the little bit of webdev I have to do at work and on side jobs. I've tried every Electron based editor out there, for all the major platforms, and they are always so damn slow and unresponsive compared to a native app.

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Same here. And yet, nobody I've worked with over the past 2 years feels Electron based editors are slow or unresponsive. I'm not just talking about kids who have never used anything else, either. Some of these people have been programming since the 80s.

It's like some people are sensitive to latency and some aren't.

I've also been told it's impossible to tell the difference between 60hz and 144hz. I can tell. I know this for a fact because my hackintosh will occasionally "forget" and switch my monitor back to 60hz when I wake it up from sleep. I notice immediately.

I'll admit I feel the difference more on my work machine (i5-2400, Windows 7) than my home workstations (i5-6500, Antergos Linux and Slackware Linux). It's definitely there though. Slack is another offender; we use it at work and our few remaining Core 2 machines and AMD A10 machines are brought to their knees with the Slack Electron app. Those users tend to launch it in a Chrome or Firefox window and leave that running.

I can also pick up on different refresh rates, and I was extremely sensitive to it on CRTs back in the 90s and early 2000s. I had to run at least 75Hz on a CRT or I'd have too much "shimmy" in the image and would get a headache in a few minutes of work. 60Hz on an LCD doesn't typically bother me unless its grey-to-grey response time is poor, and produces ghosting. Even with that I don't seem to get headaches from LCDs.

I felt like this about microstuttering 10 years ago. My computer was running at 100fps and yet it looked jerky and nobody else seemed to notice, and it was driving me mad.

Thank goodness VR came along with its extreme latency-sensitivity and suddenly everyone else cared about maximum frame time too.

I really wanted to like Atom. I've always felt that with the right attention, web apps can accomplish most things that native apps can.

Atom seemed promising and fast enough (I couldn't perceive any slowness), but once I started adding plugins to match the features I liked out of Sublime, I found Atom got really sluggish. I haven't tried any other electron-based editors, but I doubt it has the plugin ecosystem to compete with Sublime to VS, or any other big players.

I didn't realize how important having a responsive text-editor is, though. We expect a lot to happen with each keystroke, and we expect it all to happen before we press the next key. This is why I don't think that text editors are best done in JS.

That said, if this new text editor doesn't have features that compare with Sublime, then it isn't much better than Atom is to me.

I learned vi mostly over a 1200 baud modem connection through a crappy ISP. Would get several keystrokes ahead and then have to wait... Got sort of good at editing blind.

I've never experienced a slow down in VS Code, even with a 5 year old laptop. Atom is another story.

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