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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

Am I alone in rejecting this new wave of Electron/node-webkit based text editors? Every single one I've tried has been horribly slow, unstable, and a giant resource hog. I gave Atom a shot, and it crashed on importing a .csv file of a few thousand lines. What I want from a text editor is simply that: a text editor. For anything more advanced, move up to a proper IDE. Why anyone uses these over something like Sublime or NP++ blows me away.

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My main laptop broke down and I'm currently using a Pentium Dual Core T3200, 3GB of RAM, an HDD... in other words, a pretty damn old laptop.

I knew VSCode was very optimized for an Electron application, but you have no idea how fast this is. This is faster than my Vim set-up, and I have taken my sweet time making sure Vim only loads the plugins it strictly needs and I try to switch to the asynchronous version of a plugin as soon as it pops up but still, VSCode is more consistently responsive for a lot of tasks.

I'm not sure wether I'll make a full switch yet, specially once I get a proper computer back, but the quality of the plugin ecosystem (I thought vim-go was amazing, but VSCode's Go plugin is just ridiculously good and properly asynchronous) coupled with this huge performance surprise are really making me consider it.

Comparing atom and vscode is like comparing apples to oranges. They are sharing only Electron and nothing else. Some people do not want a full blown IDE (all of them are slower than VSCode) but also do not want a bare naked editor... I tried getting Sublime as feature rich as VSCode + one python plugin. Sublime was loosing and using most of the time more resources (Anaconda plugin)... code completion, auto suggestion, method jumping, inline help... everything was better in VSCode. Also not to mention the amount of help in other languages like JS. But if I would handle really big files without logic I would probably stick more to sublime.

So.. have you even tried Code? It doesn't sound like you have. It's quite fast.

Sure I have, and it's had the same issues in my opinion

Depends on what features are important to you.

On my system, the new parallel file search from VS Code is an order of magnitude faster than Sublime. For example, searching my entire project is 2 secs in VS Code vs 20 sec in Sublime

I use Atom over Sublime simply because Sublime doesn't support touch screen scrolling, and it's just second nature for me to touch and drag my screen when scrolling now.

VSCode is apparently faster than Atom, and I sped Atom up considerably by disabling languages that I rarely/never use. Timecop plugin does wonders for tracking down the slow plugins

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