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Comment by drew-y | Hacker News Reader

VSCode, an Electron app, is my favorite application of all time. It starts up quickly and is incredibly responsive in use.

It's easy to customize, there are loads of community extensions, and it's free. When abstractions allow software to have a flourishing community like that, to me its worth the cost.

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Still slower than Sublime Text. I gave VSCode a try and this is the reason I went back to Sublime Text. I already have a ST3 license so I didn't care about "free". Feature wise and community wise they are both very good, with maybe a small advantage for VSCode.

It isn't slow but it has noticeable micro stuttering. Enough to be annoying when coming from an editor that doesn't have this problem.

EDIT: Emacs feels surprisingly slow for such an old software, though not in the same way as VSCode. Vim is fast but I never really got into it.

I was actually a Sublime Text user before VSCode. I'll be the first to admit Sublime Text is faster. VSCode still wins for me in a landslide. Sublime text's performance is just not enough of an advantage over VSCode's feature set and extension marketplace.

VSCode is free as in freedom, which is pretty important to me for a tool that I completely rely on for work.

Edit: I'll also add that I've never found VSCode's performance to be a problem. It's pretty rare for me to find a file that's big enough to make VSCode choke. I suppose it might happen with multi-gigabyte log files. But usually I just use journalctl to browse those.

Easy way to make vscode choke: hold down ctrl+alt+up/down to enable multi-line editing. Let the cursor run up or down the screen for a bit. It lags a lot.

This might be because of the vsvim plugin though, itself the source of a lot of lag.

Yeah that's very odd. I use that feature a lot and have never had it choke. But I also don't use vsvim.

The killer-app feature for me on VSCode, is the ability to auto save over SSH.

I tried other things like Emacs, in Tramp mode, terrible. Gawd, it’s so terrible. It took me several days to figure out how to set it up. The documentation and examples were poor or non-existent. And when I finally got it to work, I was thoroughly underwhelmed.

I looked for something else, and found VSCode had a feature for SSH. I downloaded the module, connected to my SSH server, and I was operational in a few minutes. The difference between this and Emacs, was night and day.

And VSCode had all the other nice features, like code folding, syntax highlighting, and especially, function definition lookup, which makes it so convenient to work with your functions library.

Emacs has all those properties except fast startup and it's like 40 years old. Added layers of abstraction aren't to thank here.

Emacs is a very special case. https://m.facebook.com/notes/daniel-colascione/buttery-smoot...

Wow, thanks for that link! Great stuff.

Emacs is just the VSCode of yesteryear - there's a reason people used to joke about "emacs" standing for "emacs makes a computer slow".

Eight megabytes and constantly swapping

Meanwhile I find VSCode to be a slow resource hog. I can only assume your simply so used to terrible applications that your standards have slipped.

>"Meanwhile I find VSCode to be a slow resource hog"

Same here. It does start instantly on my laptop though

It's ok to have a different opinion. But you shouldn't assume your experience invalidates my own.

I've used a large number of text editors. Vim, Sublime Text, TextMate. I loved them all, and they are of course much faster and less resource intensive. I would still pick VSCode over each of them when given the choice.

VSCode strikes a great balance. Ironically I find it far more performant and smoother than Visual Studio itself.

> Ironically I find it far more performant and smoother than Visual Studio itself.

it does so much less that it's like comparing notepad to pycharm.

Your exact use-case may not be impacted too much, which is great - but I know a lot of programmers who use Visual Studio's entire feature set including a lot of custom C# plugins and it's not comparable at all. (Intellisense, and native step-through debugging/disassembly to begin with).

VSCode is a text/code editor that has some nice bolt-ons.

Visual Studio is a fully fledged IDE with advanced feature sets for large shared projects.

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