Comment by sansnomme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sansnomme | Hacker News Reader

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Indeed, most people seem to forget the dark ages before VS Code. When you were forced to choose between either slow heavy weights like Visual Studio/Intellij (and its relatives PyCharm et alia)/Eclipse that took forever to start up without a SSD drive or fast featureless editors like Sublime Text, Gedit, Notepad++, Vim/Emacs etc. The latter requires tons of plugins and config to get anywhere near the featureset of the former while the former often seem to have way too many knobs hidden behind collapsible panels on the side. Sure, greybeards may dismiss this as "entitled thinking" when in the Good Ol' Days when people only needed ACME with no syntax highlighting or simply Ed. Sure, but you cannot deny the productivity boost of zero-config Intellisense autocompletion that works out of the box. Language Servers that get installed automatically with all it's dependencies etc. when the parent editor plugin is installed. Configuring Emacs was a special kind of hell that required fiddling with PATH variables, jumping between FSF's poorly formatted documentation and the target language tooling. Do not mention its interaction with Python Virtualenvs; it still gives me nightmares. Getting Sublime Text working with stuff like Clojure etc. required tons of fiddling and watching YouTube videos that all differs slightly in methods. Many days were wasted editing Sublime Plugin configs and JSON files. VS Code forced editors like Atom etc. to up their game in performance, features, speed etc. Zero-config language setup and automatic prompting for installing plugins are now the norm thanks to the efforts of the wonderful VS Code team. The Vim plugin in VS Code is also second to none.

Also, a shout-out to Sublime Text for kick-starting the lightweight editor revolution in the first place, with it's cross-platform TextMate style interface and its beautiful Monokai UI color scheme. Kudos!

And for Lisp users, Light Table and Nightcode deserves praise for helping to modernize Lisp and demolishing Emacs' forced monopoly that turned off so many interested beginners. Well done Chris (and team) and Zach, thank you for bringing fresh blood and perspectives!

> Indeed, most people seem to forget the dark ages before VS Code. When you were forced to choose between either slow heavy weights like Visual Studio/Intellij (and its relatives PyCharm et alia)/Eclipse that took forever to start up without a SSD drive or fast featureless editors like Sublime Text, Gedit, Notepad++, Vim/Emacs etc.

Emacs is not “featureless”. Just like VS Code, its a pretty bare-bones but powerfully programmable editor before you consider add-ons, and just like VS Code, the available add-ons for many languages make it reasonably competitive with (or beyond) heavyweight IDEs.

> fast featureless editors like Sublime Text, Gedit, Notepad++, Vim/Emacs etc.

How do you count any of these editors — especially Sublime, Vim and Emacs — as featureless? If anything, Vim and Emacs are more fully featured than VSCode and Sublime Text not exactly far behind. I haven’t used the other two during the last few years, so can’t really comment on the state of plugin ecosystem for them.

This is a rather selective account. Visual Studio 2003-2008 were quite lightweight (even for their time). Visual Studio 2010 was the last one that didn't need gigabytes of ram to use and Visual Studio after 2012 is a horror show. Visual Studio 2003 (though good luck getting it working) is actually a smaller footprint in memory than other lightweight editors and can normally do more.

There were editors that were fine before VSCode. There was BluFish, Kate, Jedit and those are the ones just off the top of my head. Also Notepad++ is still better than most editors and doesn't need to spawn a node process that slows a i7 machine to a crawl.

As for getting sublime text working, I never had the problems you describe. So Works for me I guess.

The more Visual Studio gets rewritten in .net the slower and more bloated it becomes. Even in 2003 though it's acceptable resource usage was a result of computers improving faster than the VS team could slow things down, in the late 90's it was a very bloated resource hog, the sort that people would upgrade their computers to use.

What's amazing is just how much more bloated it is now compared to the feature set of 20 years ago, there have been very few features added that I care about day to day and even many of them fall into the category of nice to have but not particularly resource intensive.

Note: Visual Studio Code != Visual Studio. Different code bases/projects with similar names.

I'd swap Visual Studio 2010 and 2012. VS2010 is awfully slow even on a modern PC, whereas 2012 is much faster. In a previous job i had both of them installed and for some reason VS2010 had the project association instead of VS2012, leading to cursing and staring at the splash screen while waiting for the system to respond. In contrast VS2012 was MUCH faster.

To me it seemed that after deciding to rewrite the UI in WTF with VS2010 (VS2018 was native MFC) they decided to release it in essentially beta form and then fixed the performance with VS2012.

After dealing with Microsoft’s subpar effort in porting their apps to Mac you won’t find too many people who will enthusiastically install another MS product on their Mac. Especially one so crucial to their workflow.

> After dealing with Microsoft’s subpar effort in porting their apps to Mac you won’t find too many people who will enthusiastically install another MS product on their Mac.

Subpar effort in porting? They've been excellent for something closing in on a decade now. And VS Code is practically a mainstay with mac developers now.

Are you talking about Office or something else? Do you actually think the Office port is good? I’m surprised how bad it is every time I use it. Excel is soo sluggish and to me everything feels a bit off and non-native in the ux. (Vscode is good though)

Excel on a Mac is better than Numbers. At least Excel can handle tens of thousands of rows without becoming unusable.

Excel for Mac, while better than Numbers, is worse than Excel for Windows on the same hardware.

Ignoring the missing functionality (power-anything), even the one ported is buggy. It manages to crash with the same ODBC drivers, that work fine with Windows version (namely psqlODBC).

Office is fine? I mean, yes, it feels "non-native," but there's not much left that feels "native" anymore. The concept is as dead as brutalist architecture. And it's not sluggish at all on my 2015 MB Pro.

Of the three dozen or so apps on my work Mac, Mircosoft Office and Adobe are is the only ones that don't adhere to the Mac UI.

Off the top of my head:

Drag a file thumbnail from Finder onto the program icon to open the file? Nope.

Click on the name of the file in the title bar to rename or move it? Nope.

I understand that MS wants to make the interface familiar for people who use Windows, but it really is a PITA, and I wouldn't use it if I didn't have to.

“Drag a file thumbnail from Finder onto the program icon to open the file? Nope.”

Maybe it wasn’t always that way but it works fine in the current versions of Office. I’ll give you that clicking on the title bar does not let you rename or move the file though right-clicking does show the path to the file and let you open the folder in finder where I guess you could do those things.

Four years ago, Mac Office was more sluggish and lacked a lot of features. Now, the performance is fine for such a full featured app and many of the missing features have been implemented.

You can argue that you don’t like Office in general but the Mac port is no longer embarrassing.

A few of us are still bitter about Word 6 being a port, unlike 5.1.

https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-word/5x-mac

I should probably give that up. It was almost 30 years ago.

Dark ages is a bit extreme.

I’m a pretty heavy vim user, but I do recommend folks getting started to give VSCode a crack when they are getting started.

I’ve tried it myself, but I find that their vim plugin leaves a lot to be desired (or it did a year ago, when I last tried it). IdeaVim has been the best I’ve used.

Even better, Oni2 is a project to provide an out of the box editor running the text editor part on real Vim (or Neovim) but with a fancy GUI and VSCode features and plugins. No emulation necessary!

> featureless editors like … Emacs

Org Mode

Magit

eshell

AUCTeX

SLIME

Gnus

notmuch

Calc

EWW

Simple Emacs Spreadsheet

ERC

TRAMP

Methinks we have different definitions of the word 'featureless.'

I think tramp is the only one of those for which vscode has an equivalent.

>Configuring Emacs was a special kind of hell.

A "good enough" solution in emacs is actually quite easy nowadays using the "use-package" macro.

Have they fixed the dependency management issues yet? Last I checked Spacemacs required mirroring all the packages just to get somewhat close to a modern plugin installation experience. Also, those horrendous TLS compromises Emacs' made in the name of "user freedom".

https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el is really good.

>Last I checked Spacemacs required mirroring all the packages just to get somewhat close to a modern plugin installation experience.

Not sure about Spacemacs as I use vanilla Emacs, but assuming you have use-package installed (and MELPA enabled if the package you're looking for is from there), it's just a matter of adding use-package declarations like this to your config:

    (use-package magit
      :ensure t)

Don't use Spacemacs. Problem solved.

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