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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

> VSCode never felt slow on my macs until I started using Zed.

I guess you haven't used Sublime Text before?

I switched _to_ VSCode because Sublime was occasionally so slow at times that it was unusable. It was very fast 95% of the time, but then I'd `git pull` on a very big repo and my machine would become unresponsive while Sublime did...something.

I think on Linux at least it freezes due to watching too many files using inotify to update its sidebar. I wish there was an option to disable that. Same thing happens with Sublime Merge. It’s unusable on giant repos.

Sublime Text 4166 has some major improvements in that area, previously ST would check every file in the side bar for changes in order to update its index but this is now done incrementally.

This is very strange to me, because I have always used Sublime Text for super-giant corporate repos, and always found it snappy compared to vscode. Wonder if it was a specific usecase or something...

Every little while, I try to make vscode my main editor, because I enjoy all the features. I always switch back to Sublime just because VSCode's slowness bugs me.

Haven't really tried Zed in earnest yet, though, because of no custom LSP support.

I'll be eager to try Zed when it gets LSP support for sure

Not in 15ish years and at the time I think I had a 5400rpm hd, so that probably limited any perception of sublime being noticeably faster than other editors I was using (geany, kate). I don't doubt that sublime is faster than vscode today, but the vscode ecosystem is a pretty nice place to be and probably worth trading some speed for, especially on a nice mac where the trade off is probably small. Zed might be even better however.

Or vim, I suppose. It's remarkable how slow VSCode actually is, but I still use it because I hate configuring vim and packages always break when upgrading, it's honestly worse than npm.

Are you sure that’s vim rather than Melvin. Never had any issues with anything breaking on an upgrade using vim.

Not sure what Melvin is. I've always had issues, specifically when I have lots of packages, such as when installing stuff through lazy.vim.

Updating vim packages can be a nightmare if you don't vet your plugins and generally install stuff "just in case I want to try it out later". If you aren't using a plugin with any regularity, delete it.

Yeah but I never have issues with VSCode plugins, so I'm not sure what the difference is with Vim.

I don't know what vscode's plugin architecture is like but I imagine it's just that Vim's is extremely powerful and, you know, with great power comes great responsibility and all that. Unfortunately, many vim plugin authors are not responsible, or don't realize they aren't being so.

I had to stop using sublime because it kept updating its search index at inconvenient times and slowing to a crawl.

That and self updating in ways that broke my most important plugin.

I’m still using Sublime for the references. Without fail I can load up any version of an application including older rails apps sub 3 and it instantly has context. I can easily jump to definitions and even on hover will show me where they are being used. In the context of foos.bars.baz I could easily infer where bars is defined. Seems to work across languages, doesn’t matter if it’s js, ruby, in an erb file it just works. Not to mention the flavor of vim feels great.

VSCode complains and I’ve got to hardcode an alternative absolute path gemfile for Shopify’s LSP to work. It also feels clunkier, even on powerful machines.

If Zed can give parity with Sublime on the references (I just tried and it did not seem to find any references when clearly bars was there) might be an interesting change. Considering it’s open source now I’d happily switch as it does seems super quick.

I might also be old-man yells at cloud and the copilot integration doesn’t appear important yet, but current sublime support is pretty poor for it and seems like that’ll be a thing more and more.

I was hitting that bug for about 6 months, but at least for me they have actually fixed it now.

or BBEdit.

That’s where I landed after v14 with LSP support came out. It’s so nimble! And extensions with shell scripts and CLI programs is right in my wheelhouse.

Cries in PhpStorm

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