My 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.

>> 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.

This. VSCode isn't Vim and vice versa.

Over 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.

I'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.

I 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 :)

Vim handles large csv files pretty good, as well.

Not saying you should use it, just something that I found out years ago.

I've tried pure text editors, but they haven't really grabbed me, and my fingers are quite clumsy.

> 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?

It's a thing.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...

i just use less for big files, convenience is a matter of taste

I 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.

What'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?

not everybody uses a computer for the same exact thing you use a computer for

Of course, if they did there would be no point in making my comment, it would be redundant.

I think the issue with your original comment is with "there's no point," which is in effect invalidating the opinion of others.

The 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.

Interesting past thread on Atom's performance struggles and how they got outplayed by the VSCode team: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14140421

It doesn't suck, but try Jetbrains IDEs. C++ and other "not JS" language support is vastly superior including refactoring that actually works.

Jetbrains 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.

I 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.

You'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.

Webstorm or PyCharm isn't as good as IntelliJ or ReSharper, but holy hell is it better than just a text editor, even emacs.

I really don't understand why so many programmers proudly proclaim that they do things the hard way and wear that as a badge of honor.

Phpstorm compared to vim is like an oceanside resort compared to a walk in the desert without a water bottle. If there's not thousands of bugs I have prevented or discovered thanks to phpstorm, I am not surprised.

Jetbrains products are absolutely critical if you're using a dynamic, uncompiled language and to turn down the offer is professional misconduct even if it requires buying a new computer with more ram. I don't know who thought it's a good idea to pretend that a typo in one use of a variable is a legitimate expression of developer intent, but Jetbrains saves your users from that hell.

That's an old, old trope. "Real men" do it the way that takes 3X as long and yields code with more bugs.

I feel like "tool use" follows roughly the same curve as a Gartner Hype Cycle, but without an upper bound on the right (as it implies a below-peak asymptote).

In the very beginning, less is often better, since the tool is prompting you with too many things you don't understand. Then you get past that point and you're massively more productive, since it's catching all your simple mistakes. Then you become disillusioned since it doesn't catch all mistakes, and you start learning in detail how it has failed you, and you just (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ the whole thing (the "real man" trough). And in the end you go back to sophisticated tools, as you realize a 70% solution can still give you magnitudes more productivity.

But the tooling on emacs or whatever is up to par. That was my original point, not that a plain text editor is a real man's way, just that it's good enough. PyCharm or whatnot isn't necessarily much better than what you can do in emacs, but it isn't portable to other languages or as flexible. A text editor like vi or emacs isn't much different than an IDE's functionality when looking at a dynamic language. It's a WHOLE DIFFERENT WORLD with scala though (IMO - that's arguable but refactorings etc aren't on parity with intellij), and I don't foresee myself ditching intellij for scala dev any time soon.

I remember showing a scala developer who was using sublime the "extract method" feature and some refactorings in intellij and he was like "HOW DOES IT KNOW ABOUT THE CODE THOUGH???" - the IDEs have great features, but they're less differentiating for dynamic languages as a lot of the OSS tools are just as good. Eg VS Code MS Python extension for example. It's just great.

It's miles better on Python and most javascript that I've touched (VSCode's ecosystem does tend to have more breadth, and if you're working on something that VSCode has plugins for but Intellij does not, yea - VSCode can be noticeably better for most purposes). Most commonly around stuff that requires better understanding of the structure of the language / project, like refactoring and accurately finding usages.

But yes, for many dynamic languages a fat IDE is less beneficial, especially for small-ish projects (anything where you can really "know" the whole system).

VSCode is more editor then IDE.

The editor that most closest to IDE.

jetbrains stuff is written in java btw, for all languages. (when we talk about “native”/“not native”)

I don't care what it's written in.

Native UIs seem to matter more for small to medium size apps. Huge all-encompassing things like Blender, IDEs, etc. seem benefit from a unified, attractive, easy to use UI but it doesn't seem to matter quite as much that it's native. These things are intrinsically huge too so bloat matters less.

I don't think I agree with you; but I will accept that a cross platform toolkit is necessary because you cannot write three tools of the quality of one Jetbrains. But I think you could do the same in Qt with ~manual memory management and it would be significantly more efficient. Qt, I think, is less like Java and rather more akin to an alternative native toolkit (in much the same way that you can choose on X, "oh, I will use Gtk; I will use motif; I will use Qt", you can say the same on Windows "oh, I will use winapi; I will use WPF; I will use UWP; I will use Qt" or MacOS "oh, I will use Cocoa; I will use Qt"). It just happens to be provided by a third party so there's no OS lockin.

I have no problem getting more ram for a Jetbrains product, because they are cheap at the cost of a new laptop. But it would nice to find a 16 GiB laptop would be able to cope with my codebase, my web browser and my vm.

Check out clangd or ccls for VSCode. They have refactoring that actually works (probably still rather basic when compared to Jetbrains IDEs).

VSCode is Electron? I had no idea. That’s the only electron app I use willingly then! Good job MS!

The first clue is a text editor that uses 180mb of ram :)

For 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.

I 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.

If 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.)

It can do A LOT more than editing text.

I’m under the impression it’s striving to be an IDE.

I 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.

What 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. :/

Qt Creator or if my battery is real low, a text editor like Gedit (yes, I’m probably saving more there just by not having features like code completion and syntax checking).

Not old versions of Visual Studio.

As 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.

Same 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.

Anything is capable of not sucking if you go out of your way to spend several man-decades optimizing it.