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None of what you describe requires a lot of resources. Remote editing stubs are decades older than VS code, but also, many of us used X - for many years I did a

by vidarh 3y ago

None of what you describe requires a lot of resources. Remote editing stubs are decades older than VS code, but also, many of us used X - for many years I did all my work over the network because there was no reason not to. A color dialog was tens of KB of code in the 1980s. My own editor handles Unicode well enough for most users in a few dozen lines of code. RTL would take a bit more, but not much. LSP servers if anything reduce the need for the editor resource use to grow. It's not that these justify no extra resources use because they do, but they don't need to significantly increase resources use. A lot of apps get away with huge resource use simply because people aren't used to paying attention to it any more, because for most it affects them little enough in isolation, per app, that when it matters addressing the resources use of one hardly makes a difference.

jillesvangurp 3y ago
It's a bit theoretical because no editors exist that are smaller that do all of what vs code does. And a lot of what it does relies heavily on the notion that it's running in a browser. So, just tossing that out won't fly since you kind of need it for at least some of the features. It's only when you subjectively remove all the features that you don't care about that it becomes doable to make smaller editors. And that's fine. But you can't have your cake and eat it. The reason most people don't care is because it simply doesn't matter. Not even a little bit. Laptops are cheap. Memory is cheap. CPU is cheap. Your time is not. And it takes investing your time to make this stuff more optimal and faster. And VS code just does a lot of nice things that make you more productive. I use Intellij myself which uses even more resources. But it's a bit smarter and saves me even more time. The point with both is that you lose more than you gain by replacing them with something faster. It's not worth it. My first computer was a commodore 64, so I'm well aware what that thing could do (and couldn't do). I'm writing this on a M1 macbook. Orders of magnitudes faster, doing things I could not imagine back when I had a commodore 64, etc. You can have one second hand / refurbished for next to nothing. Basically below my day rate when I'm consulting.
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  My time is free. I'm not going to see a dime for any time I save by using this tool or that tool on my computer. Hardware, on the other hand, is not free, so I prefer to sacrifice time for being able to use less expensive hardware (within reason). Of course, Sublime Text exists and does everything I want from VSCode at a fraction of the hardware usage. So I don't have to choose one or the other, because actual good software exists.
  - boomlinde 3y ago
    Consider an economy of time, where you have a finite amount of time to spend, so that time spent on one thing is time not spent on another thing. If you can spend money (or maybe earn less money) to avoid spending time doing things that are uninteresting, boring or unproductive, you are allowing yourself to spend more time on things that are interesting, fun or productive.
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    If your time is free I think you're devaluing yourself ;)
- vidarh 3y ago
  Next to nothing of what VS code does depends on it running in a browser other than to the extent VS Code has made it so. It's not special. If anything it's one of the most clunky editor I've used because it tries to shoehorn everything into a convoluted UI. It's because my time matters to me I avoid VS Code as much as possible. The problem with VS Code is not that it's too slow, or too memory hungry. It could use far less, sure. And it could do so without losing any of the things about it that makes me dislike it.
  - nox101 3y ago
    there are other advantages to running in the browser. The fact that the editor is written in JavaScript/Typescript html/css means it runs in any browser. It's why there's been an explosion of online IDEs like codesandbox.io, stackblitz, github codespaces, google code cloud, repl.it and 100s of others.

by vidarh 3y ago

jillesvangurp 3y ago

It's a bit theoretical because no editors exist that are smaller that do all of what vs code does. And a lot of what it does relies heavily on the notion that it's running in a browser. So, just tossing that out won't fly since you kind of need it for at least some of the features. It's only when you subjectively remove all the features that you don't care about that it becomes doable to make smaller editors. And that's fine. But you can't have your cake and eat it. The reason most people don't care is because it simply doesn't matter. Not even a little bit. Laptops are cheap. Memory is cheap. CPU is cheap. Your time is not. And it takes investing your time to make this stuff more optimal and faster. And VS code just does a lot of nice things that make you more productive. I use Intellij myself which uses even more resources. But it's a bit smarter and saves me even more time. The point with both is that you lose more than you gain by replacing them with something faster. It's not worth it. My first computer was a commodore 64, so I'm well aware what that thing could do (and couldn't do). I'm writing this on a M1 macbook. Orders of magnitudes faster, doing things I could not imagine back when I had a commodore 64, etc. You can have one second hand / refurbished for next to nothing. Basically below my day rate when I'm consulting.

bigstrat2003 3y ago
My time is free. I'm not going to see a dime for any time I save by using this tool or that tool on my computer. Hardware, on the other hand, is not free, so I prefer to sacrifice time for being able to use less expensive hardware (within reason). Of course, Sublime Text exists and does everything I want from VSCode at a fraction of the hardware usage. So I don't have to choose one or the other, because actual good software exists.
- boomlinde 3y ago
  Consider an economy of time, where you have a finite amount of time to spend, so that time spent on one thing is time not spent on another thing. If you can spend money (or maybe earn less money) to avoid spending time doing things that are uninteresting, boring or unproductive, you are allowing yourself to spend more time on things that are interesting, fun or productive.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  If your time is free I think you're devaluing yourself ;)
vidarh 3y ago
Next to nothing of what VS code does depends on it running in a browser other than to the extent VS Code has made it so. It's not special. If anything it's one of the most clunky editor I've used because it tries to shoehorn everything into a convoluted UI. It's because my time matters to me I avoid VS Code as much as possible. The problem with VS Code is not that it's too slow, or too memory hungry. It could use far less, sure. And it could do so without losing any of the things about it that makes me dislike it.
- nox101 3y ago
  there are other advantages to running in the browser. The fact that the editor is written in JavaScript/Typescript html/css means it runs in any browser. It's why there's been an explosion of online IDEs like codesandbox.io, stackblitz, github codespaces, google code cloud, repl.it and 100s of others.