This might be one of those things like monitor refresh rate where you can only really tell the difference if you've experienced the better version for a while, but I haven't ever felt slowed down by the speed of VS Code.
I think of something like grep, where if I tried to grep a large hierarchy it'd be really slow and I'd sorta reason to myself "well yeah it's a lot of files in a large tree, of course it'll be slow!". Then I installed ripgrep and suddenly what I thought was a reasonable speed was shown to be unreasonably slow!
A few months ago I switched to WezTerm and, after some config wrestling, I've been very happy using it (https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/tree/master/wezterm).
edit: see this comment for a much better explanation than mine of what I originally meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39409763
VS Code starts in under a couple of seconds, and I have it open all day long; once open, other windows open even faster than that.
If it took any longer than a couple of seconds, I'd start blaming the extensions other editors won't have.
that's just the first noticeable difference.
but there have been instances lately where opening, editing and saving the file took me less time with zed than just open it in VS Code and waiting for it to be ready for inputs
> VS Code starts in under a couple of seconds
I am talking about relative speed differences. Imagine you open the same code base and the editor is ready in half a second. going back to the "slower" one would be unbearable.
now admittedly zed is no way near to the extensibility of VS Code so it is probably doing less and that's where probably much of the speed difference comes from, but it can't really be overlooked once you experienced it.
If I'm opening a codebase with thousands of files, I don't mind to wait a couple of seconds, as long as it's responsive afterwards.