> That's because you (probably) haven't used a modern text editor.
Can you provide an example? Because I've worked on > 1MM line projects in IntelliJ with no performance issues, or at least none related to text editing.
Holy crap, try bringing the Chromium codebase into CLion. UI freezes up constantly while the C++ indexing engine does... stuff. Then eventually hangs untill SIGKILLed. Even after giving the JVM 48 gigs on my 64gig dual Xeon 36 core workstation.
Which is a great argument for Xi's architectural choice to disentangle syntax highlighting and display out into separate processes.
A lot of people refer to atom and vscode when complaining about the performance of modern text editors and while they are not the only modern text editors by far, they are definitely some of the more popular ones at the moment.
I can definitely say that atom has performance issues. I get lockups and stutters working on small and medium sized files (hundreds to thousands of lines) and it is infuriating. It is unfortunate because there are a lot of great new plugins for these platforms but they consistently cause me all kinds of trouble.
Old school editors(like vim or emacs) or modern IDEs perform much better as text editors nowadays compared to plain modern text editors.
If you think IntelliJ is bad, what do you think of Eclipse?
One of my worst IDE experiences was working on a Scala project in Eclipse, with a whole ton of plugins installed. Latency was incredibly high. It was like working on a lagged 300 baud terminal.
> That's because you (probably) haven't used a modern text editor.
So first I have to create a problem for myself by using a "modern" editor, and then instead of fixing the problem in the obvious way (going back to the normal editor that works efficiently) I should wait around for something like this.
> If you'd follow either chrome's or firefox's changelog you'd also read about constant progress in optimizing their browser engine and dev tools.
I.e. it's not obvious from the unchangingly crappy browser experience itself, so we have to convince ourselves by believing the changelog.
> So first I have to create a problem for myself by using a "modern" editor, and then instead of fixing the problem in the obvious way (going back to the normal editor that works efficiently)
I've been working on LA*P based systems for almost 20 years. Been the head cheerleader of the Unix is the IDE camp and thought I'd never need any editor other than vim. Up until about 6 months ago.
The sad truth is because of the way modern software is engineered and this even includes web sites written in PHP (try magento 2) some modern code bases are really difficult to traverse without a decent IDE and a couple of plugins specific to the stack. Other kinds of development (android, iOS) there are IDEs (principally text editors with a few developer centric features) that add so much convenience it would be pretty dumb to sit there suffering away on the command line and vi for three weeks to accomplish poorly what I could do a lot better in a day with xcode.
Sure its doable by a talented developer but we're talking about an order of magnitude loss of efficiency and I question the brilliance of any developer who makes that call based on their religious notions about text editors.
The point is without an i7 and about 16 gigs of ram most modern IDEs are close to unusable so yeah a light, extensible text editor with some modern features is something a lot of serious software developers get pretty wet about
While I'm sympathetic to arguments that these software projects are poorly architected in violation of UNIX principles right now that doesn't pay the bills.
> I.e. it's not obvious from the unchangingly crappy browser experience itself
Unfortunately web developers's unceasing efforts to slow the web down (with massive frameworks that require custom built software and special IDEs to make and in turn leverage dozens of other such frameworks) outpace browser developers' efforts to speed it up ;)
Of course there are browsers which refuse to support all teh silliness that makes the web slow. They're not very popular though.
Can you provide an example? Because I've worked on > 1MM line projects in IntelliJ with no performance issues, or at least none related to text editing.