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baal80spam

> lightweight text editors like Visual Studio Code

I wouldn't call anything based on Electron "lightweight".

My completely subjective list of text editors in order of lightweightness:

Notepad2 - a feather

Notepad++ - a dog

VS Code - an elephant

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I'm very fond of Notepad2, but development ceased in 2012 and the fork that I'm using, Notepad2-mod [1], had its last release in 2017. I wonder how many buffer overflows are lurking in there.

I just discovered Notepad3 [2], which appears to be a maintained fork. Screenshots look very similar to Notepad2. Gotta check it out later.

Any other forks that I should be aware of?

[1] https://github.com/XhmikosR/notepad2-mod

[2] https://www.rizonesoft.com/downloads/notepad3/

My search for "notepad2" came up with https://github.com/zufuliu/notepad2, which sees routine changes: https://github.com/zufuliu/notepad2/commits/main

I use Notepad2-mod as well, didn't even know it wasn't maintained anymore! Thanks for mentioning Notepad3, I need to look into it.

If VS Code is an elephant than what are VS, IntelliJ, Eclipse? Skyscrapers? Aircraft carriers?

Eclipse is a herd of cattle sellotaped together in the shape of a giant cow.

They're not text editors.

I think most people use vscode exactly like they would use IntelliJ; it's hard for me to justify that vscode is an editor but intellij isn't.

I don't have everything setup in vscode. I mostly just use it for syntax highlighting and generally use a JetBrains IDE for programming (code navigation works much better imo)

I think you can go either way with vscode similar to the whole vi vs neovim with tons of plugins

IntelliJ and VS are like two different models of US aircraft carrier

Eclipse is like that one Russian aircraft carrier.

> If VS Code is an elephant than what are VS, IntelliJ, Eclipse? Skyscrapers? Aircraft carriers?

I was quite surprised, when I recently used VS for a small C project, at just how snappy it was for that project compared to VS Code for the same project.

I then compared it to VS Code for a larger C# project and it still compared very favourably in terms of responsiveness and speed.

I think a lot of people using VS Code are comparing small projects in VS Code to large projects in VS and concluding that it's VS that is the problem.

Yes. Though they don't pretend to be text editors.

Whales

GUI applications are only as responsive as the framework allows them to be. Because Notepad2 and the later Notepad3 were built with win32, they will start the fastest. Applications with a lot of plugins will only load as fast as those plugins can be checked and loaded to prevent exceptions. Personally, I like AkelPad since it still uses a proper MDI like Visual Studio 2008.

I haven't used it in a long time, but Textpad was my go-to ultra light. At the time, it only supported ASCII (no Unicode) so it only used one byte per character. I frequently had to open files that would hit 32 bit memory limits.

What about Vim and emacs?

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