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Comment by e-master | Hacker News Reader

I used to be a big time notepad++ user, but at some point decided to try to use VSCode as my go to text editor. The ease of use and the large number of good quality extensions more than makes up for the slight latency at startup. To my big surprise VSCode can easily handle files of the size of hundreds of megabytes, it’s just great. I like notepad++, but needless to say, nowadays I only start Notepad++ accidentally on my machine.

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There's latency in every part of the VSCode experience, not just on startup. And the startup delay is bad enough that it needs a harsher word than "latency". I made the mistake of associating VSCode with *.txt files and had to quickly switch it to something else, as I was otherwise waiting each time I tried to glance at a text file. Programs like Notepad++ and Sublime Text come up instantly.

I agree that an electron-based editor is not as responsive as a native one, but the vscode devs have done a lot to make it as fast as it is. This talk [0] is a very interesting look into everything the devs do to make it startup quickly.

[0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r0OeHRUCCb4

My workaround for the startup delay, since I use it so much, is just to autostart VS Code on OS login, and never quit. I basically treat it as part of the OS, which I've started to prefer: my computer boots up to the editor, like opening a notebook, rather than an empty "desktop".

Fair point. I honestly do not experience any noticeable latency after startup, but that is probably because my dev machine is so powerful (12 core intel core i7-8700 3.2GHz, 64GB RAM). Coincidentally I do have it associated with txt files, and as I said before I can’t complain, it works marvelously.

To be honest, I’m general I’m with the native app crowd whenever we discuss pretty much any other Electron app, but VSCode is an exception to me.

I do it the other way around, keep using Notepad++ and even occasionally do my donations share.

Only start VSCode for the workloads MS thinks I must use it, like PowerShell's ISE replacement, Azure tooling, and so forth.

And dream of the day it might be converted into either React Native or MAUI with Blazor.

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