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As an Electron hater, I’m constantly surprised at just how much VS Code doesn’t suck.
by burke 6y ago
As an Electron hater, I’m constantly surprised at just how much VS Code doesn’t suck.
- ZoomZoomZoom 6y agoThe reason for this, I think, is developers of VS Code really understand the problem field in this case, as they are making the tool for themselves. Also, there's probably a ton of resources involved.
- mmmeff 6y agoInteresting past thread on Atom's performance struggles and how they got outplayed by the VSCode team: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14140421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14140421
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoMy personal evolution has gone from Sublime Text 3 to Atom to VS Code to Sublime Text 3. I've never been a heavy plugin user, mainly sticking to code highlighting. The thing I really like is speed. Sublime Text rarely chokes on me. I love being able to type `cat some_one_gigabyte_file | subl` and getting it to open up with little difficulty. VS Code chokes on files of non-trivial size, and that was the thing I liked about it the least. For anyone wondering why I'd open up a 1 GB file in a text editor, I guess the answer is largely because it's convenient. Big log file? No problem. Huge CSV? No problem. Complete list of AWS pricing for every product in every region stored as JSON? No problem.
- fartcannon 6y agoVim handles large csv files pretty good, as well. Not saying you should use it, just something that I found out years ago.
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoI've tried pure text editors, but they haven't really grabbed me, and my fingers are quite clumsy.
- whowhatwhy 6y agoi just use less for big files, convenience is a matter of taste
- xwdv 6y agoI don’t open big files at all. There’s no point. Files exist as data made to be transformed from one form to another. It is only worth looking at a file in its final form unless you are making some kind of edit. And even then, I make edits on large files through a series of commands, never opening the file. By thinking of files in this way, it becomes easy to create programmable tool chains for manipulation.
- whowhatwhy 6y agonot everybody uses a computer for the same exact thing you use a computer for
- TheColorYellow 6y agoWhat's your typical strategy for parsing something like a large text file for some relevant data? Suppose you could cat and grep, but what if you don't know what you're looking for?
- tomxor 6y agoI'm an atom user, and it chokes for the very same reason. However I also use vim for tweaking server side stuff, and use less by default whenever I want to read something (logs is an obvious one)... This is both for speed but also UX, i believe vim style navigation (which less basically gives you), is great for reading and searching - what I cannot stand though is doing more than small edits in vim, for development (and i mean code is flying around like crazy stage of development, not read for 1 hour and make tweaks), then I am fastest with the kind of flexibility atom provides. I know it can be tempting to have one tool for everything when it seems like the tools are supposed to be doing the same thing, but in my mind lean text editors tend not to compete with the big fat slow electron style editors - so just use them both, for their respective strengths.
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoI hear you on the value a text editor on the server side. I have picked up the basics of vi for this use case, but I ain't fast with it :)
- stephc_int13 6y agoOver time I've tried quite a few popular text editors, Notepad, Emacs, Vim, UltraEdit, Sublime Text, and of course VSCode. VSCode is surprisingly good for a Microsoft product and they had to do some crazy smart engineering work to make it not sucks while being built on top of Electron. That said, it still quite slow and memory hungry, I've gone back to Sublime 3 a few weeks ago and I am not coming back to VSCode.
- cgrealy 6y ago>> VS Code chokes on files of non-trivial size VS Code isn't really designed as a general purpose text editor. It's meant as a development environment. If MS choose to optimise the experience of 99% of the use cases (i.e. editing source code, which should never even approach 1GB), then that's the correct call IMO. >> For anyone wondering why I'd open up a 1 GB file in a text editor, I guess the answer is largely because it's convenient. I can completely appreciate the use of a text editor to open a massive log file, etc, I just don't think that's something VS Code is designed for. You can always use Sublime or Atom to open those files; while getting the nicer (IMO) dev experience with VS Code.
- fomine3 6y agoThis. VSCode isn't Vim and vice versa.
- 0xkd 6y ago> Complete list of AWS pricing for every product in every region stored as JSON Is this a hypothetical file that you mention or something you actually have? Asking since I have a use-case for this data and am interested in knowing how to get it. I have read AWS has APIs for pricing info - is that where you got the data from?
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoIt's a thing. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/using-ppslong.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...
- FpUser 6y agoSame here. I am all native guy, including back end C++ servers but VS code is very decent. But then again I think the level of developers who did the main task is way above the average. And MS itself wrote that they worked super hard to optimize it for memory and performance. Something that regular developer usually ignores / does not really know how to do due to their lack of understanding how lower level tech works.
- heywire 6y agoI love vs code, and its plugin system, but if I’m on my laptop without a charger, I use something else. When I’m running vs code, my battery life is cut nearly in half.
- noahtallen 6y agoWhat do you use instead? In my experience, normal IDEs (Android Studio, Xcode, Visual Studio) all perform worse than VS Code in terms of memory use and battery. :/
- api 6y agoIt doesn't suck, but try Jetbrains IDEs. C++ and other "not JS" language support is vastly superior including refactoring that actually works.
- nwatson 6y agoJetbrains IDEs (and others for that matter) provide so much more than the glorified text-editors, including extensive debugging support (both in my own code, library code, platform code), code-autocompletion, code navigation, code-formatting, refactoring, linting, static-analysis (works well for Python as well), great syntax highlighting, spell-check, a good plugin ecosystem. I'd never go back to editing code without that support. The Jetbrains ecosystem is real cheap too, I pay US$160/year for the personal-license all-product suite I can install and use anywhere ... and I use PyCharm (Python), IntelliJ IDEA (Java et al), and Datagrip (DB) extensively, dipping into CLion (C++/Rust) as well ... but they have IDEs for many other languages and ecosystems as well. It's definitely a good deal. Jetbrains suite, along with Docker, Atlassian SourceTree, and Homebrew (and connection to AWS/Kubernetes) are my main tools these days.
- Groxx 6y agoI keep periodically re-trying VSCode, but holy cow. It's a massive step down from a Jetbrains IDE, in every single language I've dev'd in. Jetbrains stuff works, VSCode mostly handles the basics if it's possible to configure it correctly. Which is quite the achievement, and it's a very reasonable option and far better than much that came before it. But it's not where I want to spend my time if I can avoid it.
- ninjakeyboard 6y agoYou're working with statically typed compiled languages tho. Once you try using a dynamic language you realize another editor is enough IMO. I use emacs for anything dynamically typed (including compiled languages like elixir) and intellij for scala/java.
- Groxx 6y ago
- 2muchcoffeeman 6y agoVSCode is Electron? I had no idea. That’s the only electron app I use willingly then! Good job MS!
- vb6sp6 6y agoThe first clue is a text editor that uses 180mb of ram :)
- wtallis 6y agoFor comparison, I just opened up an org-mode file in Aquamacs (Emacs with macOS native GUI) and it weighs in at 105MB, which is actually lower than I would have guessed.
- sachdevap 6y agoI am running Emacs on macOS, and it only takes 43 MB barebones, and my regular setup takes about 81 MB. Both opening the same org-mode file. Point being that it really depends on what you choose to run on Emacs, and it does not have to be about 100 MB. Just to add to that, I don't think anyone should be concerned about their text editor taking 200 MB anymore. I doubt it is worth worrying about.
- squiggleblaz 6y agoIf the electron apps that I ran were the main programs I'm using and weigh in at 200 MiB, I wouldn't worry. But they're mostly background apps - chat, music - that should be using limited resources since I want them on all the time without inhibiting me. Genuine background tasks. And they're using a lot more than 200 MiB. (I use PhpStorm and Visual Studio Pro and Rider as my main foreground apps. If Jetbrains products used a mere 200 MiB, I would be worried that something had broken and reset them or reinstall them. But they're not text editors.)
- jhasse 6y agoIt can do A LOT more than editing text.
- postfacto 6y agoAnything is capable of not sucking if you go out of your way to spend several man-decades optimizing it.
- p0nce 6y agoAs a Visual Studio user, I can't get into VS Code. For once, the interface moves constantly. Things resize at all times. It feels sluggish, however Visual Studio is becoming also worse so in the end VS Code end up feeling quicker... VS Code feels _very far_ from Sublime Text usability to me.