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Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

While I appreciate VSCode, I think Discord, Slack and Obsidian are not selling the platform at all. They feel sluggish and have poor ergonomics. Now the second one may or may not be attributed to Electron depending of if you buy the cultural thinggy, but the first one clearly is. Mumble is super reactive in comparison to them, and most note softwares dance around Obsidian.

Having a latency on local clicks and transitions is not my idea of fun.

VSCode is an outlier here. And it's getting slower and slower with age, while sublime text is getting faster.

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These things are all very subjective. Not everyone is affected the same way by latency. I hear people complaining about it all the time on thw internet, but in practice I never notice it and I don't know anyone that does either. Ergonomics is the same, I think discord is really nice to use and all the alternatives I've used have been worse.

To be clear, your opinion is absolutely valid I just don't think they apply equally to everyone.

It's probably a generational thing.

The 20 last years, the web, the animations and the badly coded apps lead people to be used to slow software.

However, when you have used software for decades on much less powerful hardware, the sluggishness of all of it is kinda jarring.

This is true for me, as well. Whenever I start a 50 MHz computer and something is instantaneous instead of displaying a "Please wait…", or I start a modern computer with the Haiku operating system instead of Windows or Linux, I'm reminded just how responsive things can be.

On Android, I stumbled upon a file explorer, called Little File Explorer, that feels like this. It's 170 KiB, and generally opens directories without a feeling of transition. Instead of feeling like it's laboriously building a view, it feels almost like the view's already built. Alas, it doesn't yet remember scroll position when paging back.

Modern things can make stuff that would be slow, fast; but they also usually make stuff that can be fast, slow. I believe this normalisation of slowness is a "Normalisation of Deviance".

I can't imagine anyone calling Obsidian sluggish. Do you perhaps have a lot of plugins?

Open sublime text side by side, and it will be obvious.

Well sublime is amazing, and trying to build an Obsidian equivalent in Sublime would be astronomical work.

For what it is, Obsidian is very impressive.

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