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Comment by lcnmrn | Hacker News Reader

This is so good. Actually, a ton better than the bloated Visual Studio Code.

You seriously think VS Code is bloated? It's always super fast for me, not even noticeably slower to start than notepad2!

11MB for cudatext, 32MB for Sublime Text 3, 159MB for VS Code on macOS.

I would assume a big portion of the 150 MB+ executable is the Electron runtime. Unless they switch to a true native app like the others, I don't think it can be any smaller than it is now.

Why does this matter at all? Even a little bit? Even a tiny bit?

I'd way rather my programming editor be flexible, hackable, fully support unicode, and integrate with my workflows. When I need a hyperminimal editor I have vi, which the confusingly named CudaText is much larger than but not substantially more powerful at editing with.

Executable size comparisons are either an important part of managing core OS primitives or a complete waste of time.

The second-or-two it takes or Atom or VSCode to be fully ready once opened is extremely disruptive for flow. When I have an idea I need to type it NOW. Only the editors written in C/C++ seem to be able to keep up

A programmer's editor or IDE _might not be the only text manipulation tool you need_ then?

It's 2017. You can keep an app open, you can open more than one at a time. You can use different tools for different things.

And let the web view suck away my RAM like a leech? No thank you. This might be a good suggestion if Chromium does not manage memory usage so poorly.

lol

Nothing wrong with highlighting inefficiencies. I really like VS Code, but it does suffer from the same bloat as other electron/JS apps which is the bloat that can have a noticeable impact over time.

Please do measure and elucidate.

Well if the grandparent needs more than a hundred instances of VS Code open, that could be a serious issue.

Is the install size something to worry about?

How much RAM do you have?

It does include an entire web browser and nodejs deployment. That is pretty heavy for editing text.

But not really nearly as feature complete and lousy UX. Alternatively try sublime text perhaps?

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