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Comment by rabidrat | Hacker News Reader

> more than I like saving a few fractions of a percent of my hard drive space.

Hard disk space is seldom the actual issue. Instead, it's bandwidth used (too expensive to download over a mobile connection, or maybe not even feasible to download over a low-quality connection), or memory requirements (can't reliably use slack + spreadsheet + photoshop at the same time), or power consumption (laptop out of battery in 1 hour).

Do you like split-window, code-folding, etc etc so much that you can't download it while traveling in a rural area, have to close it so you can run Photoshop, and have to carry a spare battery so you can use it for the entirety of a 3-hour plane ride?

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> bandwidth

Why would I download a text editor every time I wanted to use it? Even VS Code is stored locally, ready to be used off-line. But let's not pick an Electron app for _everything_ we want to do: last time I checked, Notepad++ does all of what I listed, and more.

> memory requirements

Yes, this can be a problem and is a sure sign of bloat. Meanwhile, I think we're bad at picking our software: why do we just sit back and accept stuff like this? I've got 8 gigs of RAM in my dirt cheap home laptop and I can run Gimp, GNumeric, Firefox and watch a movie at the same time just fine, with plenty of RAM left to spare. For professional use, requirements are and have always been higher: hence the $15k workstations of yesteryear.

I think we're doing a bad job at promoting that the use of native software would likely have the outcome of higher productivity and lower hardware costs, because that would probably mean we're putting our own cushy web coding jobs on the line, too.

> battery life

There are still some hard limits we have to take into account. Even if I for some reason did have to work with both programming and Photoshop on a 3 hour plane ride (I luckily do not), I don't think the answer to my problems would be to switch to "ed".

>> bandwidth

>Why would I download a text editor every time I wanted to use it?

To give a serious answer: The web is literally that. And I suspect the success of the web is in a major way due to Windows' lack of streamlined package manager, as the installation ("loading") of a webpage is about a second, whereas the install time of an average Windows program involved potentially several minutes and clicking "next" several times.

Fast install times helps with discoverability - if you can click a link and "install" a browser in under a second, it becomes pretty trivial to try out ten browsers in under two minutes and encourages experimenting. Plus, you'll have reasonable expectation that you won't have to spend time cleaning up the cruft left by unwanted IDEs you don't plan to use.

Also, the install time issue also applies to updates. Web pages mostly don't have an "updating..." loading popup like e.g. Steam has every time there's an update.

Note: I am NOT advocating we all switch to web browsers. I AM advocating that we try to make our package managers a couple of orders of magnitude faster.

I am very seldom in a situation where I must download my IDE while traveling in a rural area, run it with Photoshop simultaneously, or use it for the entirety of a 3-hour plane ride.

While multi-hundred-megabyte text editors consuming double digit CPU to render some text are definitely a sign of inefficiencies _somewhere_, I value any marginal productivity benefits from these additional features over (possibly significant!) usability in very resource constrained situations.

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