Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

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> It is so remarkably slow, and I cannot begin to understand these people that are telling me that it runs fast. Granted, I tend to run older hardware

Always hard to interpret these complaints when the author won't reveal what hardware they're talking about, other than that it's old.

I think Zed is a great option for someone who is both highly critical of load times and has older hardware. I would not have recommended a JetBrains IDE given this person's requirements and hardware situation.

I use JetBrains IDEs on a daily basis and it's not a problem for me, even on my M1 Apple Silicon machine which is, what, almost 6 years old now?

That said, I'm not hyper-sensitive to things like a loading screen that takes a few seconds. I open the IDE once or twice a day at most and then leave it open. I tested it just now and went from clicking to being in the IDE and editing a file in 3 seconds on a cold start (recently rebooted) on my 6 year old laptop. When I read these anecdotes I don't know if someone has a broken environment (too many plugins installed?), a really old machine, or if they're just so hyper-sensitive that a couple seconds of loading screen seen a few times a day is enough to trigger them.

> so hyper-sensitive that a couple seconds of loading screen seen a few times a day is enough to trigger them

Reportedly the xz supply chain compromise was first noticed by someone who reported his SSH connections took an extra 500 milliseconds.

https://thegeekinsights.com/how-a-hacker-saved-the-internet/

That's a point well-taken, both non-obvious and relevant, but I'm still triggered by what I can only describe as dishonesty in the phrase quoted by GP. How can one "not understand" how other developers who clearly run (as most developers do) significantly faster hardware are not having the same issue? Unless one actively doesn't want to understand.

I’ve used WebStorm for around 6 or 7 years, coming from Sublime Text. WebStorm was noticeably slower, but it did a lot of extra things.

It still does, but it’s gotten really slow lately, locking for 3–4 seconds when scrolling a larger file. I’m also on an M1 Mac with 16GB of RAM.

I think the issue (mostly) stopped when I disabled the ESLint plugin and checks, and replaced it with Biome. WebStorm still gets a bit stuck on some files, can’t figure out why since their profiling report is a binary export.

Perhaps the author is complaining about a similar, recent slowdown. I’ve no AI plugins enabled, none of the debugger/JS profile tools, and use a custom no-color theme. WebStorm never felt slower.

Plugins are often to blame, I had some recurring issues with the full IntelliJ when opening multiple instances at the same time. I switched to Webstorm without any plugins for light editing without all plugins loaded, I have around 5 instances opened at all times without any issues on an old M1 Max

IDE's format and display text. Outside of compiling, they should respond instantly on a blight-ridden potato, with resources to spare.

Text editors just format and display text. IDEs have compilers, debuggers, indexers, source control integration, analysis tooling, WSL integration, SSH integration, and whatever plugins you might have installed.

Does that definition of “text editor” still describe anything commonly used? Language servers cover a lot of that. SSH and source control are ubiquitous. I can’t think of anything in years I’ve heard of people using that would count as just a text editor.

Most popular text editors blurs the line these days. Vim can be the most straightforward text editor out there, or the most comprehensive IDE depending on how much you go into its environment. I keep Vs code bare bones and mostly use it as a text editor, but it only needs a dozen extensions to be a full fledged IDE.

It's not surprising to hear few true text editors because a text editor is more or less a solved problem. Notepad++ is 20 years old and still functions fine for those who want a pure text editor. Anyone making a modern text editor is either doing it to learn or to build up into an IDE later.

Why would a compiler take up resources when you’re not compiling anything?

To show compilation errors as you type.

Why not show the UI immediately and start the language server asynchronously in the background, like Neovim does it?

That is possible, but if swapping happens due to memory pressure it can still cause slowdowns in unrelated parts of the same or other processes.

JetBrains IDEs do this.

  IDE's format and display text

This is only a small part of what IDEs are doing. Also, even just formatting and displaying text is hella difficult. How many years was Zed in development until 1.0?

This is obviously massively understating what an IDE does.

Do you never use language server features? Showing git blame on files? Doing regex search and replace? Doing multi-cursor editing? Run test?

If you genuinely never do, then that's ok, you don't need an IDE.

I do this all the time in Emacs, which runs on an old computer and handles it quickly. None of the tasks on this list require significant CPU resources.

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