[arghwhat]

VSCode is worlds faster than Atom. However, relative to any native editor (Sublime Text, Gedit, GVim, Notepad++, Notepad itself, ...), VSCode ranges from anywhere between "sluggish" to "... is it frozen?". Now, I agree that how big the difference is, and how big a problem that becomes is subjective, but the presence of the difference itself is not.

A good example being opening a new window. This is something I do semi-often to edit something out-of-context that shouldn't taint my current workspace. Under anything from Notepad to Gedit or Sublime Text, this task has no perceivable latency. Under VSCode, however, it is so uncomfortably slow that I actively try to avoid it, and instead use Gedit for these editing tasks. This is a significant downgrade in workflow compared to Sublime Text.

So, why do I use it? Well, features. However, what must be made very clear is that none of the features I use in VSCode exist as a result of Electron. Terminal panes and the better Go/Rust integration has nothing to do with Electron, and are within areas of difficulty that I could have added it myself over a weekend had Sublime Text been open source. But it's not, so I can't.

Electron is cancer.

[pault]

I wish we could stop calling software we don't like "a cancer". It's hyperbole and detracts from the conversation, IMO. The phrase "x is a cancer" is a cancer. :)

[arghwhat]

s/is cancer/is an awful framework that significantly and irreparably degrades user experience, stability and performance of any application written with it/g

I find the term to be quite fitting here. The use has spread to an absurd degree, meaning that there is a large change that everyone is running one or more instances of this framework at any given time, and use of this framework not only harms UX, but also brings down the machine it runs on through resource consumption. Well, maybe "pandemic disease" is better than "cancer".

When everything uses something like Electron, you the ability to simple chose to avoid it. Like a disease, Electron is that you involuntarily get subjected to, and as such, would prefer to see eradicated.

(And yes, yes, we should improve the experience of making cross-platform native apps, but due to Electron, no one is even trying anymore outside of mobile.)

[ulisesrmzroche]

What are the specs on your computer? How old is it? HDD?

[arghwhat]

My work machine that I used as reference here (my personal machines are similar, and suffer from similar sluggishness):

Intel Core i7-8700 @ 3.2GHz (12 threads, Coffee Lake)

64 GB 2666MHz DDR4 RAM (4x Kingston KHX2666C16/16G)

SAMSUNG MZVLB512HAJQ 512GB NVMe PCIe SSD

GPU is just the built-in UHD Graphics 630

Opening a new window takes presents a blank, black window that has more and more UI glitch in over a 2 second period. This is very frustrating for as a file-open delay when doing quick small edits. Gedit, on the other hand, does it in the time it takes to make the "fwoosh" opening animation (which can supposedly be disabled for faster start).

And for the record, there are no specs bad enough that a text editor should have a noticeable delay to open.

[ulisesrmzroche]

I dunno bout the graphical glitches but I run it on a machine far less beefier than yours (MacBook Air early 2014) and it runs fine for web dev on blogs and static sites and writing blog posts and small scale projects even with a bunch of plugins installed.

The only time vs code got unbearable to use for me was on this iMac late 2013 with an HDD drive I got on Craigslist a month ago but once I upgraded to SSD it was like a whole new computer, even running VMs and Kubernetes, VScode runs real nice working on large scale enterprise apps.

But yeah your computer sounds strong enough to handle any IDE so specs not the problem.