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Comment by rococode | Hacker News Reader

To me, VSCode competes with IDEs, Sublime competes with text editors. Startup speed accounts for a solid 95% of that distinction. If I need to make a quick edit to a file or write down a temporary (but reasonably persistent) note, the only tools I've tried that let me do that in less than 3 seconds are Sublime, Notepad, and Notepad++. Among those choices, Sublime is the clear winner in overall usefulness and functionality.

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Not just startup speed, but speed/efficiency, period. I use Sublime a lot to manipulate decently large csv, json, etc. files. Multi-cursor text wrangling still works well even with 10s of thousands of cursors, VSCode chokes hard way before that.

VSCode is much much faster than the popular IDEs (namely, IntelliJ) in my experience.

I'd say it occupies a middle point between full IDE and text editor.

Very true, the more features a product has the slower it opens. That middle ground is why I don't use VSCode

If I want the best IDE, its something from JetBrains. It's definitely the slowest to open up, about 9 seconds on my machine, and I wouldn't think of opening a multi GB json file in it, but past that initial open its just as fast as sublime (again on my machine).

If I want the fastest text wrangler or dealing with a massive file, its Sublime. Having used all 3, VSCode just leaves me wishing I opened one of the others.

The best thing about VScode is that it is a really good (just not the best) IDE that is also free

Is VSCode still fast after you add enough plugins to make it reach feature parity with IntelliJ?

I've tried VSCode a few times through the years, but it always seemed like I needed at least a dozen plugins to get all the features I have out-of-the-box with PhpStorm. I guess it's a philosophical difference between modular components and a big ol' monolith (though, beneath the hood, IntelliJ IS modular... most of their software is just a branded collection of plugins, though all the major ones are first-party instead of community-driven like in VSCode).

you're comparing a text/code editor with a full fledge IDE. VSCode is _not_ an IDE, it is a glorified text editor with an amazing plugin system. if you need an IDE for what you do, use PHPStorm. I myself still use Visual Studio for a lot of the stuff that I do in .Net as I find I need the features it has.

I mean, let's be honest, the difference is getting blurrier and blurrier as "text editors" gain more features over time. And workflows, too, aren't that clear-cut... is it wrong for a "text editor" to include built-in autocomplete or git support? What about project-wide regexp search, or is that a better tool for grep? Etc.

At the end of the day, I don't care what a program is classified as, only if it can do what I need it to do. Like many here, I've used Sublime for its speed on simple edits and other editors/IDEs for more complex dev work. That's fine. But VSCode occupies that in-between space, offering a mix of performance and features.

The holy grail for me would be something like PHPStorm but with better performance. I wonder if Java has something to do with it, vs it being built as a native OS app? I don't remember Visual Studio (the full IDE, not VSCode) being this slow, ever, even on old Windows 95 machines. And even back then it was pretty feature-complete too, especially compared to VSCode if not IntelliJ.

I guess my underlying question is whether it's really impossible for an IDE to be both fast and featureful.

I haven't had issues with plugin bloat, personally.

A nice feature is you can disable/enable plugins per workspace so you can only load your Java plugins for your java projects, etc.

Intellij mitigate this with https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/lightedit-mode.html

Settled into neovim for startup speed. My VSCode editor has vim keys too, so ... ohm! :)

edit: My only gripe with VSCode currently is that it seems too eager to correct my typing.

I actually battle vscode every freakin day over autocomplete. It's really bad if you're writing php and happen to have a // phpcs somewhere, it'll convert <?php to <?phpcs which makes no damn sense.

By itself VSCode won't autocorrect you. You should take a look at your extensions settings.

Sometimes after I type a variable name (the whole word, not partial) it autocorrects it into something else. I am in the habit of hitting Esc after each word now.

For my use case, autocomplete of any kind is useless, so I turn it all off. When "in the zone" anything that distracts from getting ideas out of my head as quickly as possible is annoying. Also, zen-mode, FTW.

    "editor.acceptSuggestionOnEnter": "off",
    "editor.quickSuggestions": {
        "comments": false,
        "other": false,
        "strings": false
    },
    "editor.wordBasedSuggestions": false,
    "extensions.ignoreRecommendations": true,

You can actually use this:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=asvetlia...

Actually uses a real backend neovim instance. Can’t get better vim support than that! I find it a god-send when working in VSCode as the Vim key map alternative was slow, buggy, didn’t have full support.

Now I don’t have to compromise.

I don't understand the startup time issue. Tools I use regularly like VS Code, IntelliJ, etc. are constantly running on my machine. I pay their startup cost once per reboot. Once they're running, they open files* as fast as Sublime for me. There maybe other use cases, but startup time feels pointless to me.

*files of sizes I work work. I don't care about gigabyte-sized files; if I do, vim or my existing ST3 license are good enough.

Maybe I'm weird, but I don't usually close VS Code, so this isn't an issue for me.

I don't think I've ever manually closed my text editor outside of reboots.

There's very rarely a good reason to do so. The vast majority of times when I find people saying that they use a tool for its startup time, it's not because they actually have a good reason for not keeping their editor running (e.g. memory usage), but instead because they just don't want to.

Agreed, it's nice and fast. Sublime is my go to for notes, storing quick tidbits, quick macros (this has saved me lots of time), data editing, little bits of quick code, and SQL scratch pad. There is probably a ton more I could be using it for.

For me, I use Goland and Pycharm as IDE, and VS Code as editor. I also used Sublime, but found that VS Code somehow surpassed it, and startup speed is also very fine (if you have strong computer :-)).

`emacsclient` gives you the best of both worlds. Instant startup, with as much added sugar as you can stomach.

Same. I don’t tend to need an IDE all that often. More often I want to read code and I need something that opens up FAST with good support for a WIDE variety of languages out of the box. ST ticks that box for me.

That's an excellent point. There really is a continuum that I overlooked.

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