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Comment by outside1234 | Hacker News Reader

VSCode is indistinguishable from native, so not sure its Electron that's at fault here.

This gets said a lot, and granted VSCode is certainly one of the best performing Electron apps, but it definitely is not indistinguishable from native apps. Sublime, Notepad++, or TextAdept all fly compared to VSCode in terms of performance and RAM efficiency.

On Mac, VSCode does a better job than many apps at emulating the Cocoa text input systems but, like every electron app, it misses some of the obscure corners of cocoa text input system that I use frequently.

If we’re going to use JavaScript to write native apps, I’d really like to see things like React Native take off: with a good set of components implemented, it would be a first class environment.

No. I like VS Code but it's a hog.

I still use Macvim or even Sublime Text a lot for speed reasons, especially on large files.

If your native apps are indistinguishable from VSCode, they're doing something wrong.

Start Notepad++ or https://github.com/rxi/lite and then compare the startup speed with VSCode.

I use VS Code daily (because it seems to be the only full-featured editor that Just Works(TM) with WSL), but it can get pretty sluggish, especially with the Vim plugin.

Try to use AppleScript or Accessibility. It's like VS Code doesn't even exists.

If I recall correctly, Microsoft forked their own version of electron to make vs code feel more snappy. Because normal electron runs like slack.

I don't think so, Microsoft wanted to fork electron in the past to replace Chromium with edgeHTML, but it didn't happen. VSCode is powered by Monaco Editor github.com/microsoft/monaco-editor, and VSCode feels snappier than let's say Atom, probably because of Typescript.

Try opening a moderately large (even 2MB) .json file in VSCode, and then do the same in sublime.

VSCode very quickly freezes because it cannot handle a file that size. Sublime not only opens it but syntax highlights immediately.

This is something with your configuration. OOB VSCode will immediately show you the file but disable tokenization and certain other features. I regularly open JSON files upto 10 MB in size without any problem. You probably have plugins which impede this process.

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