It probably depends on your hardware. I have an "older" (several years at least) Windows work laptop with iGPU that is quite sluggish with VS Code when hooked up to an external 4K display. However, it's snappy compared to Microsoft Teams in the same situation.

Meanwhile, my similar era MacBook with dGPU hooked up to the same screen is very snappy and I honestly would probably not be able to tell the difference in a blind test between VS Code and typing in a native text box (like the one here in Safari).

I'd consider myself pretty anal about latency -- I was never able to deal with Atom's, for example (disclaimer: I haven't tried it in years). I even dumped Wayland for X11 when I had a Linux desktop because of latency (triple buffering or something?) I couldn't get rid of.

But VS Code is not bad.

I'm using a 5K iMac with Radeon Pro 580 8 GB. I'm making the comparison vs Sublime Text which has no lag and is my standard.

On a real system or just in some syntetic benchmark? Because for me it looks quite fast in barfing out characters.

At least in base-mode. It can becoming slower when the IDE-features kicks in and autocomplete needs some time to meditate about the stae of it's world. But this also scales with size of your active sourcecode, the codebase and used language.

Also, this is some problem of all IDEs, not exclusive with VS Code.

I'm using a 5K iMac with Radeon Pro 580 8 GB. I'm making the comparison vs Sublime Text which has no lag and is my standard. This is based on my experience, not benchmarking, just try it side by side and you'll see.

My Sublime Text is decked out in plugins and so on too, there are instances where it slows down but only when it's obviously doing some processing. The basic rendering is fast, totally unlike vscode. But like I said vscode is still "fine" just uncomfortable.

That lag matters to me, but in my experience it's no worse than, say, VIM with the number of plugins that I normally run. Fully bare-bones I imagine vscode is performant as well.

Usually professionals using text editors for their work are not concerned with the absolute keystroke-to-screen latency. It’s totally fine if it’s fast enough, and it is.

Disagree on both points