Hacker News Reader

Comment by rjh29 | Hacker News Reader

IMO the killer thing is performance, VSCode starts fast and is smooth to write with. It blew away the older set of Electron-based editors. They work tirelessly on performance every release and it shows imo. Allowing extensions without destroying perf isn't easy either.

View on HN

I said basically the same in a sibling comment but I can't agree with you. VS Code doesn't start fast enough and it's not smooth to write with. It's not exactly bad but you definitely feel the slight delays and slowness all the time.

I went back to Sublime exactly to get faster startup and smoother writing than what VS Code was offering. So I'm pretty excited to see how Zed turns out!

Sublime test starts faster and smoother than vscode, but it's plugins leave too much to be desired compared to a good vscode setup.

I was a massive sublime text 2 user with a living document I would share on how to set everything up just right, but now I only ever use it to open the odd 100+mb sql dump if I want to search for something and have it be syntax highlighted.

I don't percieve any of that but I also don't care if a game framerate is 30 or 60 or 120, it's probably the same type of brain difference! More choices is always a good thing.

Which editor did you came from to think vscode start fast? msword?

Comparing it to Atom etc. It takes like 3 seconds to load a medium-sized Python project for me. And I was a long time vim user. The speed of vim is not worth the ridiculous gap in features.

Which gap? There are so many plugins. The only use I did of vscode this last year was to use the drawio integration and now I am doing diagram as code when I need to with mermaidjs or python diagrams and no longer uses it.

Even if it took 3 minutes to load it wouldn't matter because I plan to work on the project for days if not hours. OTOH, like you mentioned feature parity just puts VSCode in a different league altogether.

3 minutes(the imagined extreme scenario) pales in comparison the hours of time most people waste in meetings, or sipping coffee, or chatting with colleagues.

Just how much do you plan to achieve in 3 minutes?

You seem to not be aware that intellisense LSP support is available in many other editors than vscode.

This is why I continued to use sublime text all the way up to capitulating to TypeScript. Code was slower because of all the intellisense. I've had Code freeze on me a few times. Something that I don't have happen in Sublime or Vim. If you have a lot of RAM and work on a current mainstream OS it may seem smooth, but it's still using 400mb of RAM. May as well use Eclipse or WebStorm FWIW. That said I'm using VSCode now too, but things can always be better :).

Part of it may be just Windows. I use Windows a lot to move files and folders around and the File Explorer is something I constantly need to wait on to respond. The Windows as GUI is not very responsive in my experience.

> "but it's still using 400mb of RAM"

Why does this matter? What is the point of saving RAM instead of using it?

Because all my ram is already consumed. I have a 16gb MacBook running only a browser, vscode, ms teams, and the docker containers for the app and I have no memory left so I see a spinning ball every time I change windows. Ms teams was the final straw. Slack was about 300mb but teams is now 700mb+

It matters because your program is probably not the only one running.

It’s a small amount and if you’re using it then it should take priority. Modern operating systems with SSDs are very good at managing memory anyway.

Once you exceed it some of the content will go to swap, which is going to slow down the system (and wear an ssd faster). 400MB is not that much though, for me Code usually takes at least 1.5GB RAM.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com