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Comment by kowlo | Hacker News Reader

What was wrong with VSCode?

For me the electron tax is frustrating. File switching and text input just feel sluggish compared to Sublime Text. The VS Code ecosystem is superb though.

Its more the electron tradeoff. We have picked slightly slower software if it means more software at a cheaper price which works on more platforms and has more features.

Vim and sublime still exists and yet people flock to VS code because they would rather get a more powerful laptop to run an electron app.

I wonder how much of this is just a psychological effect from knowing it's Electron beforehand.

Sometimes I think I can almost perceive a little bit of slowness compared to e.g. Sublime—but then I lose sight of it.

Certainly in comparison to any similarly fully-featured IDE I've used its feel is notably quicker.

That it's an Electron app, mostly.

That's the reason it's excellent IMO. I get nearly the same exact experience on every platform... including when you embed it's components within a web app which is very useful.

I might be the Lone Ranger that agrees with you.

I have a windows machine and a Mac machine. The electron apps are the ones most most likely to function exactly the same on both machines.

Setting up vs code was a matter of copying and pasting config file.

Yes, perhaps we're alone in this thread but with 14 million users (out of an estimated 24 million) world wide we're probably in the majority.

Picky users might complain but from what I see, most users are just fine with Electron apps. We all use Slack, Discord, etc. at work and everybody loves it.

It's one of the best Electron apps I've used in my life, honestly. But it still lags a little behind what I would expect from the same software written natively.

For me, running more than one Electron app at a time for too long is a recipe for kernel panic.

I only have two on my machine: VSCode, and Microsoft Azure Explorer. If I run them both at the same time, there's a 20% chance I'm going to have to reboot that day.

Microsoft has enough money and resources to make a real program, but it chooses to be lazy and cheap.

I think there's a huge tragedy of the commons when it comes to RAM. I get all the arguments about unused RAM being wasted RAM, and that it is more effective to drop a cache at the last moment, just in case it would be used before then. But those arguments only apply if you have a single entity handling the allocations. Otherwise the program holding the memory has no idea that it should drop a cache to allow a different program to use the memory. If the single program is the OS, great. If there's a single large program using RAM such as a browser, then it's still workable but not so great. If you have more than one program each trying to eat 80% of the RAM available, then you're in a world of hurt.

And of course, every program thinks that it's the one and only important program running on the computer, which is how we get into the situation we're in.

IM applications are the worst offenders --- they are often left in the background and only for notification purposes, yet we somehow end up with monstrosities like Slack and Teams which use more RAM when idle than an entire computer a decade ago.

I think the most infuriating thing is azure containers don’t really work with standard FTP clients like transmit

But as long as the product is “good enough “we will see this trend more as most consumers of apps care more about features than performance

> Microsoft has enough money and resources to make a real program, but it chooses to be lazy and cheap.

They made one of the best text editor/IDE and released it for free. I wouldn't call that being lazy and cheap.

VSCode isn't a gift to developers. It's a marketing tool.

Why can't it be both? Microsoft has been doing great things recently, with VSCode, Typescript, C#. Of course maybe it's the first step of EEE. I'm personally worried about the VSCode/developing in containers that's closed source/Github/NPM acquisition, that sounds like they're preparing some kind of best of class developing experience (probably linked with Azure too) that will be proprieteray. But for now they remain well behaved, and everything until now is open source.

That’s it’s not IntelliJ? Honestly, it’s not bad, but I think the price is the main thing it has going for it.

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