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I'm very interested in the general perception of VS Code being fast, because for me it's slow enough that it's the main reason I use other editors. Here are a c

I'm very interested in the general perception of VS Code being fast, because for me it's slow enough that it's the main reason I use other editors. Here are a couple of examples: 1. It takes nine times as long as Vim to open a minified JavaScript file, and then format it with Prettier: https://twitter.com/robenkleene/status/1285631026648276993 https://twitter.com/robenkleene/status/1285631026648276993 2. It takes 14 times as long to open an empty text file than BBEdit: https://twitter.com/robenkleene/status/1257724392458661889 https://twitter.com/robenkleene/status/1257724392458661889 Both of the above examples revolve around opening files for the first time, and I suspect a lot of the slowness I perceive is because I open a lot of different projects and source code files when I'm working, and this is a bad use of VS Code. In practice, VS Code behaves more like a multi-language IDE than a text editor. Slow startup times are generally acceptable in IDEs because you're exchanging speed for power. A programmer should ideally be proficient in both an IDE and a text editor, because they're tools applicable to different problems. E.g., VS Code is a terrible choice for things like analyzing log output, formatting large files, testing isolated snippets of code, or working on source code files that aren't part of the same project. I find this to be a shame because VS Code is flexible enough that it would otherwise be excellent for all of these tasks if it were just more performant for some operations that it struggles with now.

arethuza 6y ago
Out of interest do you mean starting a new instance of VS Code for those things or using an existing one. I would agree that VS Code isn't the fastest thing when the editor is starting up, though I find it fine when started. I pretty much always have VS Code running so I don't find this a problem.
- robenkleene 6y ago
  VS Code is already running in both examples. A lot of the overhead seems to come from making a new window (even though the app itself is already running), although notably most of the time spent in the Prettier example seems to be spent syntax highlighting the JavaScript. If you want to try a direct comparison of opening a file vs. a window, you can see the difference between opening a new file in an existing window (on Mac, `⌘N` / `File > New File`) or new window (on Mac, `⌥⌘N` / `File > New Window`). For me the latter is far slower than the former.

arethuza 6y ago

Out of interest do you mean starting a new instance of VS Code for those things or using an existing one. I would agree that VS Code isn't the fastest thing when the editor is starting up, though I find it fine when started. I pretty much always have VS Code running so I don't find this a problem.

robenkleene 6y ago
VS Code is already running in both examples. A lot of the overhead seems to come from making a new window (even though the app itself is already running), although notably most of the time spent in the Prettier example seems to be spent syntax highlighting the JavaScript. If you want to try a direct comparison of opening a file vs. a window, you can see the difference between opening a new file in an existing window (on Mac, `⌘N` / `File > New File`) or new window (on Mac, `⌥⌘N` / `File > New Window`). For me the latter is far slower than the former.