I love VSCode, but Electron apps are still pretty brutal on battery life, so it’s hard to work for very long without being plugged in. I’d personally love a pure native version for that reason alone, but the feature set wins out for day to day usage since I work mostly from home anyways.

I love the things VSCode offers that its competition doesn’t. I can’t imagine working with any of the other available editors for the Mac. I hate how I feel like I’m working in a weird web app all day every day. I feel both simultaneously.

Give Panic's Nova a try:

https://nova.app

Wanted to say I started taking a look yesterday and I’m not sure how I feel about it yet. But I don’t have my whole workflow set up yet. Thanks for the nudge, I’d been meaning to give it a look!

No vim plugin makes it DOA as far as I'm concerned

Compare it to plain vim and you'll be shocked at the responsiveness difference. I even find the jetbrains IDEs kinda laggy.

I’ve always found Jetbrains stuff really laggy, even when I tried Clion on my current maxed out 16” MBP, to be honest it’s one of the things that has always put me off their software. The text entry might not be laggy but the general UI has that “laggy Java” (sorry, I know it’s not a Java fault but I just associate it with Java GUI apps!) feel. Personally I find VS Code much more responsive on the whole.

I've been a software developer since the 1990s. I know how Vi(m) feels and I much prefer the affordances offered by VS.Code.

Ironically Jetbrains IDEs are Java, using Java Swing for the UI[1]! This is even less native than VS.Code where at least native widgets are used.

I guess this shows how much our impressions are formed by expectations!

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/12311981/280795

Swing is definitely not "less native" than Electron. The entire window is a web view in Electron apps. I believe Java Swing was even an officially supported UI toolkit on the Mac a long time ago.

Not in the way Cocoa is, but it had a PLAF coming from Apple at the time.

The menus in Swing aren't native but are in Electron.

Maybe Electron supports native menus, but VS Code certainly doesn't use them, at least on Windows and Linux.

Simple experimental proof: resize the window to be very small, and open a menu. The menu can't go outside the bounds of the window.

What menus?

>"I even find the jetbrains IDEs kinda laggy."

On my laptop (6 core 3,9GHz 32GB RAM and NVME) VS Code is fast and responsive, still wastes lots of RAM though. Jetbrains tools meanwhile were way more laggy on the same setup.

VSCode users never seen snappy and well-made IDE. Most probably think "source code highlighting" + "project drawer" = IDE.

Just going to leave this here https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

I just suck it up and adopt the tooling required by customer's IT, on private laptops I use Sublime instead, and pay for it.

And I dream the day that React Native for Windows/Mac team at Microsoft manages to force a VSCode rewrite.

It’s a huge mixed bag. Great and terrible at same time.