12 ms·

I can't stand using VSCode so I wrote my own

212 points by redman25 2y ago

PhilipRoman 2y ago
Really cool work. By the way does it support variable DPI? Maybe it's just a limitation of how my sandbox is set up, but font size and everything else seemed a bit small.
- levodelellis 2y ago
  Right now I have only the icon and font size as hardcoded. I plan on implementing a config file so users can set their own font, size and etc. I have no idea when I'll release another build. I'll be spending the next week catching up on sleep
barfard 2y ago
[dead]
Pannoniae 2y ago
To be fair, it's not hard to outperform something written in Electron with native code with a factor of ten :) Anyway, this is really impressive, so good job!
- Osiris 2y ago
  One of the benefits of Electron is being able to build the same app for multiple operating systems. When writing GUI app using native OS calls, how does one make sure the code is compatible with all three major operating systems?
  - titusjohnson 2y ago
    Typically by reading docs and writing compliant code.
    - dymk 2y ago
      Were it only that easy
      - pineaux 2y ago
        Tell me how its fundamentally not this easy? Its just not really "easy" to write correct compliant code.
  - generalk 2y ago
    Folks did this plenty prior to Electron, either by using cross-platform GUI toolkits (GTK and Qt both run on Windows, Java's been doing this forever with Swing and JavaFX, etc), or by writing GUIs for multiple toolkits/OSes that work with the same/similar core application logic. Electron makes it easier to build cross-platform apps, and certainly cheaper, but it's not like it's the only way to do it.
  - levodelellis 2y ago
    I'm the author. I had experience with SDL and wrote a test to confirm it still performs well (I never tried it on linux). It did, SDL has been ported to just about every OS. I have some OS specific code for windows but not much. The only OS specific things were executing a binary + stdio + closing it and slight differences in socket code (mostly used for DAP). C++ now has filesystem support so I didn't need any OS specific code for that
  - Marsymars 2y ago
    This is an important consideration for the developer/publisher, but less so for the user. I use all three major operating systems on a daily basis, and typically preferentially prefer single-OS apps, as I can typically expect them to be more performant and to better follow a platform's UI conventions.
- newaccount74 2y ago
  Opening a 1GB JSON file and scrolling, editing, and keeping syntax highlighting correct is something that even native text editors struggle with.
  - Alifatisk 2y ago
    Sublime have opened way larger files with no issues for me
    - eyelidlessness 2y ago
      I’ll second this. And to emphasize, so it’s not just a useless “+1 comment”: I never cared for Sublime as an editor, despite some effort to appreciate it when it was at its popularity peak. But it instantly became, and remained, my go to editor for working with huge files.
  - arghwhat 2y ago
    Native code does not replace efficient algorithms. V8 can also JIT JS to something that runs fast, although the extra layers of abstraction between web code and platform interfaces do not help, and V8 can only do so much.
  - Pannoniae 2y ago
    Notepad++ is a champ at doing that, as long as it has line breaks. (It chokes with massive single-line files like any other editor)
    - zo1 2y ago
      Love Notepad++ to bits, but it chokes on just 20MB of nicely-formatted XML if you have syntax highlighting on. Disable that (if you can figure out how), and you're golden.
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    I had to buy UltraEdit which is capable of handling 10GB files (the size in my case). Nothing else that I tried would work. Of course, this was ten years ago. I havent had to work with very large text files since then. It was able to perform search and replace at an acceptable and responsive pace, nearly instant.
Vermyndax 2y ago
I use vscode for doing devops-y things (Terraform, OpenTofu, JSON, python, yaml, txt, dockerfiles, etc.) and sometimes the way it bogs down my system drives me bananas. I'll punt to Sublime Text on occasion and use it for a few days, but then start running into papercuts in various places and have to go back to vscode. I so, so wish there was a better way to do this without fucking electron.
- bbkane 2y ago
  Keep an eye on https://lapce.dev/ https://lapce.dev/ and https://zed.dev/ https://zed.dev/ . Both immature, but show a lot of promise! Also both open source, so (in theory, I haven't tried) you can contribute patches to fic your issues
  - gcardinal 2y ago
    Man, Zed gives me hope, but it's missing so many features and (robust) extensions. Monthly I'll open it and see if I can start working with it, but the day still has not come.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > devops-y things (Terraform, OpenTofu, JSON, python, yaml, txt, dockerfiles, etc.) > I so, so wish there was a better way to do this without fucking electron. I do all of those things in vim and it works fine. No GUI and I'm sure it's missing some fancy new features, but it's fast and reliable (and it's not electron).
  - Vermyndax 2y ago
    There is some syntax highlighting for Terraform in nano, so maybe I should try rolling with the terminal for a while.
  - candiddevmike 2y ago
    I traded vim for VSCode back when VSCode was fast. These days, there is so much shit running in VSCode by default that it has become an unruly mess. I couldn't tell you what happens when I save or open a file like I could with Vim--what checks are being ran or what telemetry is being exfiltrated. At this point it's just laziness and inertia keeping me on VSCode, getting my neovim setup back (along with the muscle memory) keeps getting pushed off.
nextaccountic 2y ago
Is it open source? What programming language and what GUI toolkit does it use? I really want GUI programs that don't lose a frame no matter what.
- levodelellis 2y ago
  I'm the author, I haven't seen it drop a frame when running in a release build. I had experience with SDL and wrote a test to see if it performs as well as I remembered. It did, so I implemented this without using a GUI toolkit. I didn't really want to fight (and optimize) a toolkit to implement syntax highlighting, autocomplete, etc It's written in C++ because I knew I'd spend time optimizing it. I've been writing C++ for 20years so I didn't hurt my foot or do anything that caused me harm
  - NikkiA 2y ago
    well, you put SDL in it, which has so many i18n and accessibility gotchas that you've pretty much blown both your feet off already. I'd be surprised if it's keyboard handling is robust enough to work with non US layout keyboards for a start.
skilled 2y ago
No offense, but who made this? How did the submitter find this? The Download page has a name but a Google search doesn’t return much. Not that anyone would run a binary just like that, but I do find it interesting.
- mlhpdx 2y ago
  I hope developers are among the most careful about putting new things on their systems. I hope.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    > I hope. I have... simply the worst of news.
    - varelse 2y ago
      [dead]
  - solardev 2y ago
    I usually read most of the description's first sentence before downloading a npm package. Does that count?
  - vundercind 2y ago
    Nah, we can’t work without admin on our system because we need to install 100 programs we’ve never really vetted, a couple of which have been out of support for a decade. How else are we going to efficiently add 20,000 lines of code we haven’t read as dependencies to our project… this week? We’d love to do things safer but it’s not in the sprint plan, which plan assumes speed only possible if you use third party tools and code you haven’t properly vetted for basically everything. Never mind that then you slow to a halt when infosec sees a CVE rate of ten a week against all those packages you had to have, often against ones you’re not even using but are a dep-of—a-dep for some optional functionality you don’t invoke, and now your team spends 80 person-hours a week addressing those and messaging about doing those and having code reviews of one-line dep version bumps and running regression tests and moving them through the deployment pipeline (we’re Responsible and Safe, as you can plainly see, so of course we have at least three multi-step stages to get to deployment, wouldn’t want to be unsafe!), all because we want to “move fast” but also “be safe” (but not at the same time, so the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing until everything’s already all fucked up) (Sigh)
varelse 2y ago
[dead]
deleted 2y ago
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ksec 2y ago
VSCode is slow? I mean, for 7 years? Somewhere around early 2017 things started to get out of hand and VSCode was super hyped. To the point 99% on HN was saying it was very fast. Initially ( Pre 2017 ) it was compared to Atom which means the bar was low. And then somehow people start claiming it was as fast as Sublime or they see no difference. As someone mentioned down below, both Lapce and Zed is designed with speed in mind. Or just use VIM. VSCode may be flexible, but it is only fast by the measure of an electron App.
- __jonas 2y ago
  It's fast enough for me to not notice any slowness. I switched to it from JetBrains IDEA because it was literally causing seconds of delays when scrolling / entering code during heavy indexing in large projects. I never noticed anything of the sort in vscode, even if extensions are doing a lot of background work I don't notice any significant impact in the UI, I can always scroll and type without interruption. I tried out zed, I don't really find it noticeably faster, although I'm sure it is! I guess there are people who are more sensitive to this sort of thing but for me it's really completely fine.
- ehnto 2y ago
  Probably a combination of new developers and wide spread use of SSDs have made it's public image of speed. But really it is pretty quick, on modern hardware it is more or less instant at most tasks. I use Jetbrains IDEs and am migrating to neovim, even Jetbrains is basically instant searching across large codebases once on good hardware.
- jinushaun 2y ago
  If I were to guess, like everything else, it’s fast until you install extensions.
gostsamo 2y ago
VSCode is still on the top of accessibility, so when you can claim that you work perfectly with a screen reader, you will convince me to switch.
- bigcoke 2y ago
  people often overlook accessibility and other essential features of a modern editor, you telling me that your rudimentary rust editor is faster than vscode? and? people don't use it because it's fast (it's not).
  - vbezhenar 2y ago
    How is accessibility an essential feature? I'm not disabled, so I don't care if editor is accessible or not. I care about my use-cases. And I use vscode precisely because it's crazy fast.
    - viraptor 2y ago
      You're not disabled yet. But you may want to care about this before your eyesight, motor accuracy, etc. start failing. It's not some big "disabled/not" switch - setting the font 1pt higher is accessibility, changing the colours is accessibility, being able to tab through fields consistently is accessibility, etc.
      - soerxpso 2y ago
        The idea that I might eventually become disabled still doesn't make it an essential feature. Disabled users are not a significant portion of the userbase of most software. Accessibility is an essential feature for a text editor in the same way that Linux support is an essential feature for Fortnite.
        viraptor 2y ago
        > Disabled users are not a significant portion of the userbase of most software. Have I got news for you. https://www.disabled-world.com/disability/statistics/ https://www.disabled-world.com/disability/statistics/ > Currently, around 10% of the world's population, or roughly 650 million people, live with a disability. > In countries with life expectancies over 70 years of age, people spend on average about 8 years, or 11.5 percent of their life span, living with disabilities. Sure, not all of the disabilities will apply to using an editor. But disabilities overall are very common. A significant proportion of users of anything are disabled in some way - it just may not be obviously visible.
causal 2y ago
BTW if VSCode is slow for you, check what extensions you have installed.
- awfulneutral 2y ago
  Yeah, for me it's more than fast enough except for the Microsoft pylance and C# extensions, both of which I really need to feel productive, and both of which (especially pylance) make VS Code much slower and buggier. It has been getting bad enough that I've been looking around for other editors, but as far as I can tell VS Code really wins on having all the language features, plus copilot and git integration in a single place.
  - neonsunset 2y ago
    C# extension generally has acceptable performance (as long as you use Roslyn LSP and not the Omnisharp one, although it also was fast at the cost of higher memory usage and less stability). What could be slowing it down is other extensions, especially if they have heavy Roslyn analyzers. For large project it doesn't scale as well, which is where Rider comes into play, I still daily drive VSC as the editor since it's just way snappier and more fluid than Rider.
- rstat1 2y ago
  Even without extensions its always gonna be slower than a proper native app.
macrael 2y ago
Sublime text is great! It’s been worth it to write small plugins to fix my biggest complaints but since they got LSP runni by first class it has been a great place to be.
swah 2y ago
And Zed?
- teo_zero 2y ago
  Doesn't Zed only run on MacOS?
  - dkersten 2y ago
    Yes, although there is a Linux version underway. It seems to be about ~80% complete, maybe check it in a few months. No idea of a windows version is in progress or planned though.
macromaniac 2y ago
>I'd tweak the script; then to see the results I would press F5 to run the already built binary and wait over a second EVERY SINGLE TIME (about 1480ms). I put in a bug report for this years ago but it got ignored :( https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/137066 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/137066 Vscode has gotten slower over time. It's true you can't get nanosecond performance out of JS, but anything under 17ms should be trivial. I believe the vscode developers are skilled, it's just they don't care (imo) enough about performance for whatever reason, and that's a shame.
- croes 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - cdaringe 2y ago
    My experience on their issue tracker is, if i give thoughtful input i get thoughtful responses. Ive had multiple issues and features acted on. YMMV i suppose.
    - croes 2y ago
      But how many of that input should have been from internal testing instead of users after the rollout?
      - alanjay 2y ago
        Microsoft don't have internal testing. They get the devs, who already know the code, to see if it makes sense. And woe betide you if you disagree with the PM!
        croes 2y ago
        That's my point, they outsourced their testing to the customer. That's a no-go.
  - chucky 2y ago
arun-mani-j 2y ago
When I had a 2 GB laptop lying around, I always wanted a simple text editor with auto-completion etc. (Though only for Python, Linux) After trying KDevelop, Kate, Eric, Sypder etc. I thought I could write my own. I had a simple plugin system in mind, with similar to LSP style features (VSCode was not released that time). The UI was inspired by Blender. Blender has such a fluent UI where you can customize everything. So I wrote a small GTK library to mimic Blender's UI. And started development of the text editor. But then got busy with school and left the idea. Then I found out Emacs and Doom Emacs and dropped the idea of a custom text editor eventually :). Two reasons: 1. Emacs was 200% configurable, which is what I wanted to implement in my editor too. 2. Emacs worked pretty good on my 2 GB laptop with all the goodies. But compared to 10 years back (when I was trying these things), it is quite easy now thanks to LSP, Tree-Sitter etc. But it is always a fun ride with algorithms and data structures. :) I haven't used VSCode, but it is really nice how it changed the text-editor platform with LSP etc. Now I have a laptop with 24 GB RAM but I'm forever vendor locked-in with Emacs :D
- fullstop 2y ago
  During the vi / emacs wars, the joke was that emacs stood for "eight megabytes and constantly swapping". How times have changed.
  - alanjay 2y ago
    It's now eighty megabytes ;)
    - Toorkit 2y ago
      Tiny!
  - fuzztester 2y ago
    Or, Eventually Munches All Computer Memory. There were probably other expansions too.
- smitty1e 2y ago
  I've liked Emacs, but the left-handedness of the key-chords tore me up all the way to the shoulder after any substantial amount of use. Spacemacs was my answer. https://www.spacemacs.org/ https://www.spacemacs.org/
dandigangi 2y ago
Could have just used Visual Studio if you/re deep in C# lol
- neonsunset 2y ago
  Visual Studio editing experience is just not nice compared to VS Code. A lot of developers have moved on to Rider or VS Code + Rider combo nowadays.
- viraptor 2y ago
  Have you tried doing much with VS/C# in practice? I get some new, weird bug every time I use it, the UI preview tabs take ages to show up, the compilation delay is easily crossing 2s, etc. It's really not great if you're already bothered by the speed of vscode.
Solvency 2y ago
[flagged]
- TillE 2y ago
  I'm sure you can come up with a scenario where input does slow down (eg, in huge complex files), but speaking as someone with experience speedrunning action games which require frame-perfect (60Hz) tricks, I can't detect any noticeable lag between hitting a key and a glyph appearing on the screen in VS Code. If something's slowing it down, it's probably an autcomplete feature which can be configured to trigger less frequently.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  The only thing that keeps me using it are tools that decided only to support VSCode.
- leptons 2y ago
  I'm not a "kid", I've been coding for 40+ years, and I don't find VS Code to be slow. YMMV.
- dang 2y ago
  We've banned this account for posting tons of unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments and ignoring our requests to stop. Not cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40056291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40056291 (4 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39021400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39021400 (Jan 2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37512571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37512571 (Sept 2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
tiffanyh 2y ago
> FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY Since the license says for personal use, I assume that means I can’t use this in a corporate setting? https://bold-edit.com/download https://bold-edit.com/download
- mysteria 2y ago
  If you interpret this very strictly it could even imply that this editor couldn't be used to say write open source code that's distributed to the public. Basically all you could do with it is write code at home for your own use.
  - tiffanyh 2y ago
    That’s why I ask actually. Whats the generally accepted legal interpretation for “personal use”.
    - CaptainFever 2y ago
      I wonder, does it even matter? Who would know what editor you used to write a piece of code?
      - adithyassekhar 2y ago
        Unless the author has the significant resources to audit any companies he's suspicious of, no one will know.
- beeboobaa3 2y ago
  All my work in a corporate setting is personal use. It's me personally using the software to earn money. Point is, "personal use" is such a nonsense term.
- bugthe0ry 2y ago
  I assume that means "don't rely on this in any serious setting" and/or "don't try to sell it for profit".
vrnvu 2y ago
This reminds me of the famous Visual Studio rant by Casey Muratori https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U And the hundreds (if not thousands :D) of rants by Jon Blow saying how contemporary software performance sucks
- levodelellis 2y ago
  Have you seen "Jonathan Blow plays Visual Studio"? I ran across it after I started and understood his pain
  - scubbo 2y ago
    That guy is hilarious, thank you for sharing!
armchairhacker 2y ago
The author could try forking and patching VSCode to fix the annoyances manually. Years ago I had an issue with VSCode: it was missing a small feature that was very important to me, with the GitHub issue stuck in limbo. I ended up going into the source and implementing the feature myself. It took a few hours after bugfixing, I think the fix was ~100 LOC. Then I used the locally-built version. I recall building took a while, and the source and artifacts took a lot of space, but no other problems. I also created a PR referencing the issue and it got merged rather quickly. Someone else ended up finishing the work since there were some problems (I think relating to coding conventions, and possible edge cases I didn’t need or handle). Maybe I was lucky for the feature to not require much edits, and probably for the PR to get taken over and then merged fast. But it seems like the author's issues are also small, and it would be easier and more ergonomic to patch VSCode than to create an entirely new debugger.
- omni 2y ago
  I had a near-identical experience. I looked into switching in 2019 and ran into this 2016 bug which was a showstopper for me. Fixed it myself, grand total 4 line diff. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/10643 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/10643
- sam0x17 2y ago
  Sometimes it's easier to start from scratch than figure out how some storied monolith works
  - xtracto 2y ago
    This article by Joel Spolsky has some good advice related to that: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... Tldr: avoid rewriting software. Most likely the gigantic monolith got big because because of all the business logic encoded in there.
- nailer 2y ago
  Just a thought that sometimes people developing C# since the early 2000s don’t come from an open source culture, so fixing bugs in someone else’s programs doesn’t appear in their default list of resolutions.
magicalhippo 2y ago
On the flipside, I recently had to make some changes to a ~1.5GB XML file, like in the middle of the file. I had a sudden flashback to the Atom editor, which developers considered a 1MB XML file as "large", and hence it totally chocked on a 100MB one I tried once, crashing out after eating 8+GB of RAM. To my mild surprise, it opened in a few seconds, and while all the fancy checking stuff got disabled, basic syntax highlighting still worked so element tags were colorized. Finding and changing the offending element was not much different from normal. I checked memory usage, expecting it to be astronomical, but it was quite within reason (~3 GB IIRC). I admit I did not expect it to go that well.
- rrishi 2y ago
  You didn't mention which editor you were able to edit the large XML in. Just confirming, it was VSCode? Because that'd be amazing!
  - magicalhippo 2y ago
    Yes, VSCode as of half a year ago.
pipes 2y ago
The only thing that annoys me about VS code is that Microsoft decided to call it visual studio, which means if I search for help for a problem with actual visual studio I end up with vscode suggestions. Id like to know why ms thought this was a good idea.
- Onawa 2y ago
  Microsoft has been flopping with their naming recently... Case in point, Copilot. GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Copilot, Office 365 Copilot... all different products for different uses. Still can't figure out why they didn't follow through with Cortana being the OS copilot name and retired it. It was such a perfect fit. My only guess is that they are worried about anthropomorphizing the AI.
  - sibit 2y ago
    > Still can't figure out why they didn't follow through with Cortana being the OS copilot name and retired it. I can't figure out why they didn't use it as an opportunity to bring back Clippy.
    - amne 2y ago
      most likely because of greyhairs with PTSD
tasuki 2y ago
It really is too bad vs code is the only available option. If only there were more editors for people to choose!
- yoyohello13 2y ago
  Yeah imagine if there was an editor that was super fast and lightweight that was designed with extendability as a first class citizen.
yoyohello13 2y ago
This is pretty cool, but why not use neovim or emacs or something?
syngrog66 2y ago
vim exists
briandear 2y ago
Or just use Vim. Not sure I understand the obsession with VSCode.
- levodelellis 2y ago
  Have you had a good debugging experience with (neo)vim? I'm the author
  - YorickPeterse 2y ago
    There are DAP extensions for both Vim (e.g. https://github.com/puremourning/vimspector https://github.com/puremourning/vimspector) and NeoVim (https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap). I can't speak as to the experience in detail (I think I briefly played with nvim-dap a year or two ago), but I suspect that for most it will be good enough.
  - zilti 2y ago
    And same for Emacs, great LSP and DAP integration.
    - levodelellis 2y ago
      I heard someone say gdb works great with emacs but I never had a good experience with C++ in neovim. I asked friends and they all say they use a second editor to debug which is part of why I bothered to do this
      - zilti 2y ago
        Oh, yes, I used to use gdb just a small handful of times a few years ago, but Emacs' gdb mode is very powerful. But I assume there is a gdb DAP as well by now?
  - miniupuchaty 2y ago
    It's not ideal for me yet. I've had some problems with DAP. The DAP servers I've checked were a bit unstable and slow. For now I'm using gdb with nvim-gdb https://github.com/sakhnik/nvim-gdb https://github.com/sakhnik/nvim-gdb Very reliable and as fast as gdb is. But with all the problems just using gdb has.
mdaniel 2y ago
While trying to cough up more details about this, I discovered https://bolinlang.com/faq#:~:text=One%20issue%20we%20have%20right%20now%20is%20no%20one%20has%20heard%20of%20the%20project https://bolinlang.com/faq#:~:text=One%20issue%20we%20have%20... so it seems the skunkworks site design is a thing. I especially enjoyed the "cloud company stol my shit" vibe
duckman1 2y ago
[dead]
thih9 2y ago
Congrats on the launch! The non-open license is a blocker for me; an editor is perhaps the most important tool for me as a programmer, I'm unwilling to risk not being able to use it how I want. This looks like the same reason that made the author write their own editor. I won't do that, I will stick to vim and emacs.
EasyMark 2y ago
Currently and for the past year or so neovide+nvim+lazy has been the thing that got me off vscode.
m0n0x41d 2y ago
Should you nvim, btw
m0n0x41d 2y ago
Should use nvim, btw
w10-1 2y ago
As an alternative to VSCode, consider Theia[1]. Open-source, runs all the VSCode extensions, etc. [1] https://theia-ide.org https://theia-ide.org
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  That's the one that took the Monaco editor (the part of VS code originally made by Microsoft) and then advertised it as the true alternative to VS Code.
yencabulator 2y ago
Lapce https://lapce.dev/ https://lapce.dev/ is a very promising up-and-coming editor that has the "VSCode looks" but could use more developer effort to get it to be finally usable.

212 points by redman25 2y ago

Really cool work. By the way does it support variable DPI? Maybe it's just a limitation of how my sandbox is set up, but font size and everything else seemed a bit small.

levodelellis 2y ago
Right now I have only the icon and font size as hardcoded. I plan on implementing a config file so users can set their own font, size and etc. I have no idea when I'll release another build. I'll be spending the next week catching up on sleep

barfard 2y ago

[dead]

Pannoniae 2y ago

To be fair, it's not hard to outperform something written in Electron with native code with a factor of ten :) Anyway, this is really impressive, so good job!

Osiris 2y ago
One of the benefits of Electron is being able to build the same app for multiple operating systems. When writing GUI app using native OS calls, how does one make sure the code is compatible with all three major operating systems?
- titusjohnson 2y ago
  Typically by reading docs and writing compliant code.
  - dymk 2y ago
    Were it only that easy
    - pineaux 2y ago
      Tell me how its fundamentally not this easy? Its just not really "easy" to write correct compliant code.
- generalk 2y ago
  Folks did this plenty prior to Electron, either by using cross-platform GUI toolkits (GTK and Qt both run on Windows, Java's been doing this forever with Swing and JavaFX, etc), or by writing GUIs for multiple toolkits/OSes that work with the same/similar core application logic. Electron makes it easier to build cross-platform apps, and certainly cheaper, but it's not like it's the only way to do it.
- levodelellis 2y ago
  I'm the author. I had experience with SDL and wrote a test to confirm it still performs well (I never tried it on linux). It did, SDL has been ported to just about every OS. I have some OS specific code for windows but not much. The only OS specific things were executing a binary + stdio + closing it and slight differences in socket code (mostly used for DAP). C++ now has filesystem support so I didn't need any OS specific code for that
- Marsymars 2y ago
  This is an important consideration for the developer/publisher, but less so for the user. I use all three major operating systems on a daily basis, and typically preferentially prefer single-OS apps, as I can typically expect them to be more performant and to better follow a platform's UI conventions.
newaccount74 2y ago
Opening a 1GB JSON file and scrolling, editing, and keeping syntax highlighting correct is something that even native text editors struggle with.
- Alifatisk 2y ago
  Sublime have opened way larger files with no issues for me
  - eyelidlessness 2y ago
    I’ll second this. And to emphasize, so it’s not just a useless “+1 comment”: I never cared for Sublime as an editor, despite some effort to appreciate it when it was at its popularity peak. But it instantly became, and remained, my go to editor for working with huge files.
- arghwhat 2y ago
  Native code does not replace efficient algorithms. V8 can also JIT JS to something that runs fast, although the extra layers of abstraction between web code and platform interfaces do not help, and V8 can only do so much.
- Pannoniae 2y ago
  Notepad++ is a champ at doing that, as long as it has line breaks. (It chokes with massive single-line files like any other editor)
  - zo1 2y ago
    Love Notepad++ to bits, but it chokes on just 20MB of nicely-formatted XML if you have syntax highlighting on. Disable that (if you can figure out how), and you're golden.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  I had to buy UltraEdit which is capable of handling 10GB files (the size in my case). Nothing else that I tried would work. Of course, this was ten years ago. I havent had to work with very large text files since then. It was able to perform search and replace at an acceptable and responsive pace, nearly instant.

Vermyndax 2y ago

I use vscode for doing devops-y things (Terraform, OpenTofu, JSON, python, yaml, txt, dockerfiles, etc.) and sometimes the way it bogs down my system drives me bananas. I'll punt to Sublime Text on occasion and use it for a few days, but then start running into papercuts in various places and have to go back to vscode. I so, so wish there was a better way to do this without fucking electron.

bbkane 2y ago
Keep an eye on https://lapce.dev/ https://lapce.dev/ and https://zed.dev/ https://zed.dev/ . Both immature, but show a lot of promise! Also both open source, so (in theory, I haven't tried) you can contribute patches to fic your issues
- gcardinal 2y ago
  Man, Zed gives me hope, but it's missing so many features and (robust) extensions. Monthly I'll open it and see if I can start working with it, but the day still has not come.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> devops-y things (Terraform, OpenTofu, JSON, python, yaml, txt, dockerfiles, etc.) > I so, so wish there was a better way to do this without fucking electron. I do all of those things in vim and it works fine. No GUI and I'm sure it's missing some fancy new features, but it's fast and reliable (and it's not electron).
- Vermyndax 2y ago
  There is some syntax highlighting for Terraform in nano, so maybe I should try rolling with the terminal for a while.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  I traded vim for VSCode back when VSCode was fast. These days, there is so much shit running in VSCode by default that it has become an unruly mess. I couldn't tell you what happens when I save or open a file like I could with Vim--what checks are being ran or what telemetry is being exfiltrated. At this point it's just laziness and inertia keeping me on VSCode, getting my neovim setup back (along with the muscle memory) keeps getting pushed off.

nextaccountic 2y ago

Is it open source? What programming language and what GUI toolkit does it use? I really want GUI programs that don't lose a frame no matter what.

levodelellis 2y ago
I'm the author, I haven't seen it drop a frame when running in a release build. I had experience with SDL and wrote a test to see if it performs as well as I remembered. It did, so I implemented this without using a GUI toolkit. I didn't really want to fight (and optimize) a toolkit to implement syntax highlighting, autocomplete, etc It's written in C++ because I knew I'd spend time optimizing it. I've been writing C++ for 20years so I didn't hurt my foot or do anything that caused me harm
- NikkiA 2y ago
  well, you put SDL in it, which has so many i18n and accessibility gotchas that you've pretty much blown both your feet off already. I'd be surprised if it's keyboard handling is robust enough to work with non US layout keyboards for a start.

skilled 2y ago

No offense, but who made this? How did the submitter find this? The Download page has a name but a Google search doesn’t return much. Not that anyone would run a binary just like that, but I do find it interesting.

mlhpdx 2y ago
I hope developers are among the most careful about putting new things on their systems. I hope.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > I hope. I have... simply the worst of news.
  - varelse 2y ago
    [dead]
- solardev 2y ago
  I usually read most of the description's first sentence before downloading a npm package. Does that count?
- vundercind 2y ago
  Nah, we can’t work without admin on our system because we need to install 100 programs we’ve never really vetted, a couple of which have been out of support for a decade. How else are we going to efficiently add 20,000 lines of code we haven’t read as dependencies to our project… this week? We’d love to do things safer but it’s not in the sprint plan, which plan assumes speed only possible if you use third party tools and code you haven’t properly vetted for basically everything. Never mind that then you slow to a halt when infosec sees a CVE rate of ten a week against all those packages you had to have, often against ones you’re not even using but are a dep-of—a-dep for some optional functionality you don’t invoke, and now your team spends 80 person-hours a week addressing those and messaging about doing those and having code reviews of one-line dep version bumps and running regression tests and moving them through the deployment pipeline (we’re Responsible and Safe, as you can plainly see, so of course we have at least three multi-step stages to get to deployment, wouldn’t want to be unsafe!), all because we want to “move fast” but also “be safe” (but not at the same time, so the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing until everything’s already all fucked up) (Sigh)

varelse 2y ago

[dead]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ksec 2y ago

VSCode is slow? I mean, for 7 years? Somewhere around early 2017 things started to get out of hand and VSCode was super hyped. To the point 99% on HN was saying it was very fast. Initially ( Pre 2017 ) it was compared to Atom which means the bar was low. And then somehow people start claiming it was as fast as Sublime or they see no difference. As someone mentioned down below, both Lapce and Zed is designed with speed in mind. Or just use VIM. VSCode may be flexible, but it is only fast by the measure of an electron App.

__jonas 2y ago
It's fast enough for me to not notice any slowness. I switched to it from JetBrains IDEA because it was literally causing seconds of delays when scrolling / entering code during heavy indexing in large projects. I never noticed anything of the sort in vscode, even if extensions are doing a lot of background work I don't notice any significant impact in the UI, I can always scroll and type without interruption. I tried out zed, I don't really find it noticeably faster, although I'm sure it is! I guess there are people who are more sensitive to this sort of thing but for me it's really completely fine.
ehnto 2y ago
Probably a combination of new developers and wide spread use of SSDs have made it's public image of speed. But really it is pretty quick, on modern hardware it is more or less instant at most tasks. I use Jetbrains IDEs and am migrating to neovim, even Jetbrains is basically instant searching across large codebases once on good hardware.
jinushaun 2y ago
If I were to guess, like everything else, it’s fast until you install extensions.

gostsamo 2y ago

VSCode is still on the top of accessibility, so when you can claim that you work perfectly with a screen reader, you will convince me to switch.

bigcoke 2y ago
people often overlook accessibility and other essential features of a modern editor, you telling me that your rudimentary rust editor is faster than vscode? and? people don't use it because it's fast (it's not).
- vbezhenar 2y ago
  How is accessibility an essential feature? I'm not disabled, so I don't care if editor is accessible or not. I care about my use-cases. And I use vscode precisely because it's crazy fast.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    You're not disabled yet. But you may want to care about this before your eyesight, motor accuracy, etc. start failing. It's not some big "disabled/not" switch - setting the font 1pt higher is accessibility, changing the colours is accessibility, being able to tab through fields consistently is accessibility, etc.
    - soerxpso 2y ago
      The idea that I might eventually become disabled still doesn't make it an essential feature. Disabled users are not a significant portion of the userbase of most software. Accessibility is an essential feature for a text editor in the same way that Linux support is an essential feature for Fortnite.
      - viraptor 2y ago
        > Disabled users are not a significant portion of the userbase of most software. Have I got news for you. https://www.disabled-world.com/disability/statistics/ https://www.disabled-world.com/disability/statistics/ > Currently, around 10% of the world's population, or roughly 650 million people, live with a disability. > In countries with life expectancies over 70 years of age, people spend on average about 8 years, or 11.5 percent of their life span, living with disabilities. Sure, not all of the disabilities will apply to using an editor. But disabilities overall are very common. A significant proportion of users of anything are disabled in some way - it just may not be obviously visible.

causal 2y ago

BTW if VSCode is slow for you, check what extensions you have installed.

awfulneutral 2y ago
Yeah, for me it's more than fast enough except for the Microsoft pylance and C# extensions, both of which I really need to feel productive, and both of which (especially pylance) make VS Code much slower and buggier. It has been getting bad enough that I've been looking around for other editors, but as far as I can tell VS Code really wins on having all the language features, plus copilot and git integration in a single place.
- neonsunset 2y ago
  C# extension generally has acceptable performance (as long as you use Roslyn LSP and not the Omnisharp one, although it also was fast at the cost of higher memory usage and less stability). What could be slowing it down is other extensions, especially if they have heavy Roslyn analyzers. For large project it doesn't scale as well, which is where Rider comes into play, I still daily drive VSC as the editor since it's just way snappier and more fluid than Rider.
rstat1 2y ago
Even without extensions its always gonna be slower than a proper native app.

macrael 2y ago

Sublime text is great! It’s been worth it to write small plugins to fix my biggest complaints but since they got LSP runni by first class it has been a great place to be.

swah 2y ago

And Zed?

teo_zero 2y ago
Doesn't Zed only run on MacOS?
- dkersten 2y ago
  Yes, although there is a Linux version underway. It seems to be about ~80% complete, maybe check it in a few months. No idea of a windows version is in progress or planned though.

macromaniac 2y ago

>I'd tweak the script; then to see the results I would press F5 to run the already built binary and wait over a second EVERY SINGLE TIME (about 1480ms). I put in a bug report for this years ago but it got ignored :( https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/137066 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/137066 Vscode has gotten slower over time. It's true you can't get nanosecond performance out of JS, but anything under 17ms should be trivial. I believe the vscode developers are skilled, it's just they don't care (imo) enough about performance for whatever reason, and that's a shame.

croes 2y ago
[flagged]
- cdaringe 2y ago
  My experience on their issue tracker is, if i give thoughtful input i get thoughtful responses. Ive had multiple issues and features acted on. YMMV i suppose.
  - croes 2y ago
    But how many of that input should have been from internal testing instead of users after the rollout?
    - alanjay 2y ago
      Microsoft don't have internal testing. They get the devs, who already know the code, to see if it makes sense. And woe betide you if you disagree with the PM!
      - croes 2y ago
        That's my point, they outsourced their testing to the customer. That's a no-go.
- chucky 2y ago

arun-mani-j 2y ago

When I had a 2 GB laptop lying around, I always wanted a simple text editor with auto-completion etc. (Though only for Python, Linux) After trying KDevelop, Kate, Eric, Sypder etc. I thought I could write my own. I had a simple plugin system in mind, with similar to LSP style features (VSCode was not released that time). The UI was inspired by Blender. Blender has such a fluent UI where you can customize everything. So I wrote a small GTK library to mimic Blender's UI. And started development of the text editor. But then got busy with school and left the idea. Then I found out Emacs and Doom Emacs and dropped the idea of a custom text editor eventually :). Two reasons: 1. Emacs was 200% configurable, which is what I wanted to implement in my editor too. 2. Emacs worked pretty good on my 2 GB laptop with all the goodies. But compared to 10 years back (when I was trying these things), it is quite easy now thanks to LSP, Tree-Sitter etc. But it is always a fun ride with algorithms and data structures. :) I haven't used VSCode, but it is really nice how it changed the text-editor platform with LSP etc. Now I have a laptop with 24 GB RAM but I'm forever vendor locked-in with Emacs :D

fullstop 2y ago
During the vi / emacs wars, the joke was that emacs stood for "eight megabytes and constantly swapping". How times have changed.
- alanjay 2y ago
  It's now eighty megabytes ;)
  - Toorkit 2y ago
    Tiny!
- fuzztester 2y ago
  Or, Eventually Munches All Computer Memory. There were probably other expansions too.
smitty1e 2y ago
I've liked Emacs, but the left-handedness of the key-chords tore me up all the way to the shoulder after any substantial amount of use. Spacemacs was my answer. https://www.spacemacs.org/ https://www.spacemacs.org/

dandigangi 2y ago

Could have just used Visual Studio if you/re deep in C# lol

neonsunset 2y ago
Visual Studio editing experience is just not nice compared to VS Code. A lot of developers have moved on to Rider or VS Code + Rider combo nowadays.
viraptor 2y ago
Have you tried doing much with VS/C# in practice? I get some new, weird bug every time I use it, the UI preview tabs take ages to show up, the compilation delay is easily crossing 2s, etc. It's really not great if you're already bothered by the speed of vscode.

Solvency 2y ago

[flagged]

TillE 2y ago
I'm sure you can come up with a scenario where input does slow down (eg, in huge complex files), but speaking as someone with experience speedrunning action games which require frame-perfect (60Hz) tricks, I can't detect any noticeable lag between hitting a key and a glyph appearing on the screen in VS Code. If something's slowing it down, it's probably an autcomplete feature which can be configured to trigger less frequently.
pjmlp 2y ago
The only thing that keeps me using it are tools that decided only to support VSCode.
leptons 2y ago
I'm not a "kid", I've been coding for 40+ years, and I don't find VS Code to be slow. YMMV.
dang 2y ago
We've banned this account for posting tons of unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments and ignoring our requests to stop. Not cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40056291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40056291 (4 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39021400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39021400 (Jan 2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37512571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37512571 (Sept 2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

tiffanyh 2y ago

> FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY Since the license says for personal use, I assume that means I can’t use this in a corporate setting? https://bold-edit.com/download https://bold-edit.com/download

mysteria 2y ago
If you interpret this very strictly it could even imply that this editor couldn't be used to say write open source code that's distributed to the public. Basically all you could do with it is write code at home for your own use.
- tiffanyh 2y ago
  That’s why I ask actually. Whats the generally accepted legal interpretation for “personal use”.
  - CaptainFever 2y ago
    I wonder, does it even matter? Who would know what editor you used to write a piece of code?
    - adithyassekhar 2y ago
      Unless the author has the significant resources to audit any companies he's suspicious of, no one will know.
beeboobaa3 2y ago
All my work in a corporate setting is personal use. It's me personally using the software to earn money. Point is, "personal use" is such a nonsense term.
bugthe0ry 2y ago
I assume that means "don't rely on this in any serious setting" and/or "don't try to sell it for profit".

vrnvu 2y ago

This reminds me of the famous Visual Studio rant by Casey Muratori https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U And the hundreds (if not thousands :D) of rants by Jon Blow saying how contemporary software performance sucks

levodelellis 2y ago
Have you seen "Jonathan Blow plays Visual Studio"? I ran across it after I started and understood his pain
- scubbo 2y ago
  That guy is hilarious, thank you for sharing!

armchairhacker 2y ago

The author could try forking and patching VSCode to fix the annoyances manually. Years ago I had an issue with VSCode: it was missing a small feature that was very important to me, with the GitHub issue stuck in limbo. I ended up going into the source and implementing the feature myself. It took a few hours after bugfixing, I think the fix was ~100 LOC. Then I used the locally-built version. I recall building took a while, and the source and artifacts took a lot of space, but no other problems. I also created a PR referencing the issue and it got merged rather quickly. Someone else ended up finishing the work since there were some problems (I think relating to coding conventions, and possible edge cases I didn’t need or handle). Maybe I was lucky for the feature to not require much edits, and probably for the PR to get taken over and then merged fast. But it seems like the author's issues are also small, and it would be easier and more ergonomic to patch VSCode than to create an entirely new debugger.

omni 2y ago
I had a near-identical experience. I looked into switching in 2019 and ran into this 2016 bug which was a showstopper for me. Fixed it myself, grand total 4 line diff. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/10643 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/10643
sam0x17 2y ago
Sometimes it's easier to start from scratch than figure out how some storied monolith works
- xtracto 2y ago
  This article by Joel Spolsky has some good advice related to that: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... Tldr: avoid rewriting software. Most likely the gigantic monolith got big because because of all the business logic encoded in there.
nailer 2y ago
Just a thought that sometimes people developing C# since the early 2000s don’t come from an open source culture, so fixing bugs in someone else’s programs doesn’t appear in their default list of resolutions.

magicalhippo 2y ago

On the flipside, I recently had to make some changes to a ~1.5GB XML file, like in the middle of the file. I had a sudden flashback to the Atom editor, which developers considered a 1MB XML file as "large", and hence it totally chocked on a 100MB one I tried once, crashing out after eating 8+GB of RAM. To my mild surprise, it opened in a few seconds, and while all the fancy checking stuff got disabled, basic syntax highlighting still worked so element tags were colorized. Finding and changing the offending element was not much different from normal. I checked memory usage, expecting it to be astronomical, but it was quite within reason (~3 GB IIRC). I admit I did not expect it to go that well.

rrishi 2y ago
You didn't mention which editor you were able to edit the large XML in. Just confirming, it was VSCode? Because that'd be amazing!
- magicalhippo 2y ago
  Yes, VSCode as of half a year ago.

pipes 2y ago

The only thing that annoys me about VS code is that Microsoft decided to call it visual studio, which means if I search for help for a problem with actual visual studio I end up with vscode suggestions. Id like to know why ms thought this was a good idea.

Onawa 2y ago
Microsoft has been flopping with their naming recently... Case in point, Copilot. GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Copilot, Office 365 Copilot... all different products for different uses. Still can't figure out why they didn't follow through with Cortana being the OS copilot name and retired it. It was such a perfect fit. My only guess is that they are worried about anthropomorphizing the AI.
- sibit 2y ago
  > Still can't figure out why they didn't follow through with Cortana being the OS copilot name and retired it. I can't figure out why they didn't use it as an opportunity to bring back Clippy.
  - amne 2y ago
    most likely because of greyhairs with PTSD

tasuki 2y ago

It really is too bad vs code is the only available option. If only there were more editors for people to choose!

yoyohello13 2y ago
Yeah imagine if there was an editor that was super fast and lightweight that was designed with extendability as a first class citizen.

yoyohello13 2y ago

This is pretty cool, but why not use neovim or emacs or something?

syngrog66 2y ago

vim exists

briandear 2y ago

Or just use Vim. Not sure I understand the obsession with VSCode.

levodelellis 2y ago
Have you had a good debugging experience with (neo)vim? I'm the author
- YorickPeterse 2y ago
  There are DAP extensions for both Vim (e.g. https://github.com/puremourning/vimspector https://github.com/puremourning/vimspector) and NeoVim (https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap). I can't speak as to the experience in detail (I think I briefly played with nvim-dap a year or two ago), but I suspect that for most it will be good enough.
- zilti 2y ago
  And same for Emacs, great LSP and DAP integration.
  - levodelellis 2y ago
    I heard someone say gdb works great with emacs but I never had a good experience with C++ in neovim. I asked friends and they all say they use a second editor to debug which is part of why I bothered to do this
    - zilti 2y ago
      Oh, yes, I used to use gdb just a small handful of times a few years ago, but Emacs' gdb mode is very powerful. But I assume there is a gdb DAP as well by now?
- miniupuchaty 2y ago
  It's not ideal for me yet. I've had some problems with DAP. The DAP servers I've checked were a bit unstable and slow. For now I'm using gdb with nvim-gdb https://github.com/sakhnik/nvim-gdb https://github.com/sakhnik/nvim-gdb Very reliable and as fast as gdb is. But with all the problems just using gdb has.

mdaniel 2y ago

While trying to cough up more details about this, I discovered https://bolinlang.com/faq#:~:text=One%20issue%20we%20have%20right%20now%20is%20no%20one%20has%20heard%20of%20the%20project https://bolinlang.com/faq#:~:text=One%20issue%20we%20have%20... so it seems the skunkworks site design is a thing. I especially enjoyed the "cloud company stol my shit" vibe

duckman1 2y ago

[dead]

thih9 2y ago

Congrats on the launch! The non-open license is a blocker for me; an editor is perhaps the most important tool for me as a programmer, I'm unwilling to risk not being able to use it how I want. This looks like the same reason that made the author write their own editor. I won't do that, I will stick to vim and emacs.

EasyMark 2y ago

Currently and for the past year or so neovide+nvim+lazy has been the thing that got me off vscode.

m0n0x41d 2y ago

Should you nvim, btw

m0n0x41d 2y ago

Should use nvim, btw

w10-1 2y ago

As an alternative to VSCode, consider Theia[1]. Open-source, runs all the VSCode extensions, etc. [1] https://theia-ide.org https://theia-ide.org

TiredOfLife 2y ago
That's the one that took the Monaco editor (the part of VS code originally made by Microsoft) and then advertised it as the true alternative to VS Code.

yencabulator 2y ago

Lapce https://lapce.dev/ https://lapce.dev/ is a very promising up-and-coming editor that has the "VSCode looks" but could use more developer effort to get it to be finally usable.