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Comment by sghiassy | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I don’t understand when someone says VSCode is slow because it’s built on Electron. Are they talking about the 3 extra seconds on cold start? Is that really something to scoff at considering all its benefits??

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On my laptop there is a noticeable keystroke delay compared to other editors.

I've paralyzed VSCode by opening a 20MB file with test data.

Not the tab, the whole workspace. Force quit and everything.

VSCode has its upsides but it's a dog.

For what it does, it’s slow. I used Jetbrains IDEs and I understand the slowness because of all the linting and indexing. But I bear with it because they are tailored to the language that they support and provide you with great utilities. VSCode tries to be the kitchen sink and it’s not great at either. And it’s not just code editing, every interaction with the interface feels slow. If I have 12 cores and 32 GB of ram, slowness for the same thing I was doing on codeblocks with a P4 and 1 GB of ram is the last thing I would accept.

Depends how often you’re opening / closing it, I suppose. I work in an nvim + tmux environment, and am frequently opening and closing single files across disparate directories, so it does matter to me. I can spawn a new pane (or split existing), open nvim, and be editing before VSC has finished launching.

You can open files from disparate directories within the same VSCode instance though.. you don't need to launch a new instance for each one.

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