Really? VS Code has been the best example of what Electron could be that I've seen. In practice it's just as responsive as Sublime Text 3 for files under 25MB.

VS Code is indeed one of the best Electron apps.

And it's also unpleasantly clunky and heavyweight, with unpredictable unresponsiveness as GP notes.

It’s been my daily IDE for a couple years and the only time it felt clunky or overweight is when I had installed a misbehaving extension. I remember feeling as you described, but after removing the bad extension it became snappy again.

I think they actually have a tool for discovering which extension is the bottleneck?

Even something as basic as code search is nightmarishly slow. I frequently resort to CLI tools when VSCode doesn't respond quickly enough. Thankfully it usually handles cancellation requests well so that I don't have to continue waiting for whatever god-forsaken process is running after I've already found my answer via other means, but I'm not going to pretend it isn't slow.

I've never had a full code search in VSCode run any slower than instant.

Either you have a massive codebase that outstrips every one I've ever worked on, or something is really busted there.

It must definitely is. I use it daily, and if you compare speeds with something native like sublime, every single task is slower in execution. Most might only be milliseconds slower but it is perceptible in over all feeling.

For me, I can live with it, but I definitely 'feel' it when I jump back into something native.

I opened Sublime yesterday and it absolutely screams in comparison to VS Code.

In my experience it depends how you use VSCode. For one project (and only a few well behaved extensions), even if it’s quite large, it can perform very well. Working in multiple projects the proscribed way (workspaces) comes with a variety of caveats. Multiple windows can increase CPU and RAM load pretty fast.

I have the complete opposite experience with VSCode versus Visual Studio.

Visual Studio feels like I am using a clunky old slow piece of software, to me. Takes forever to build and run the solution, hell it takes forever to even open a workspace.

Code feels blazing fast in comparison

Parent may have been referring told older Visual Studio versions, back before MS web-ified it into a slow pile of garbage.

Maybe I'm just pining for the old days, but Visual Studio 6 is still my favorite IDE of all time. Intellisense was fairly new and it only activated if you pressed Ctrl-Space. I didn't have little pop-ups and type-aheads trying to steal my attention and all I did was think about the C++ code I was writing.

This was around 1997, mind you. The build from the IDE still took almost 2 hours to complete.

As it stands now, I still use IDEs. I try to disable every "convenient distraction" feature they have, but I've had had to settle for the fact that I can't make them work the way I want.

It's not just VS, either. Every app has to have some attention-stealing, display obstruction mouseover. And it just seems to get worse and worse every year. So much noise for almost zero value.

IIRC, in one of more recent versions of VS, hovering over a method param will show the type of the param. The same info that's already declared to the left of the param.

How is this helpful at all?

Even worse: There doesn't seem to be a way to even fine tune this. I don't need prompts in my face 100ms after I hover over something. They might be useful after 2000ms. But it seems to be all or nothing. I've been using Mads Kristensen's Disable Tooltips extension to preserve my sanity.

If you want to see ugly, open the Azure portal sometime. Hovering too long (e.g. 200ms) over an element may open up a bigger dialog, and if you hover even longer, you get an even bigger dialog that blocks out other things that I might want to look at. It also has a nasty habit of clickjacking my intended target because of this.

I think a lot of this garbage comes from this idea that you need to keep the user engaged for whatever metrics. The problem is that although this is fine for adverts and social media sites, this is exactly what you don't want for productivity. Unfortunately, it seems like these people change jobs/teams and end up bringing this mentality with them.

Thanks for the tip about the Disable Tooltips extension. I'm using Visual Studio for a couple of projects and you've just removed one minor annoyance from my life and I appreciate it very much.

We use MyEclipse for a lot of our Java development and I found something in their latest release that gave me chills: selecting multiple lines of text in an editor will bring up a control to start a "CodeTogether" session. That can be disabled, but I really have to wonder about why selecting some code in my editor means that I need to "phone a friend."

The Azure Portal is absolutely spiteful. I've been using that as an object example of poor UI design for my junior developers. All of that work they've put in to make it responsive and I still have to hit F5 to see if my VM really started...

The Azure Portal is the next level of hell for users who need a responsive, out-of-the-way interface to do their work.

There is a trend to make UIs more and more noisy every release, to the point where you have to be engaged on everything.

Example #1: When I quit a Teams meeting, I randomly get asked to rate the meeting (unwanted behavior), instead of going back to the last application I have open (desired behavior)

Example #2: When I edit an Azure DevOps wiki page and paste a link into the text editor, I expect no other behavior than the typical paste behavior. Instead, I get a vestigial popup which steals focus and prevents me from typing or moving the cursor with the up/down keys until I hit Escape. Imagine if you have to link to multiple pages to this wiki. It completely kills my productivity by over 50%.

Example #3: When I use the mobile version of the Vivaldi browser, closing a tab should just bring me back to the last tab. It does that, but then has a pop-down dialog telling me I closed the tab, blocking the bottom of the browser. Dumb.

Example #4: Screenshots in Android. Instead of just flashing the screen once to indicate the screenshot was taken, it now adds more context-related garbage to the bottom left corner of the screen, sometimes blocking controls. Really dumb.

Example #5: Opening a Teams meeting. I click on the Outlook reminder to open the calendar invite, then click on Join Teams Meeting that brings Teams to the foreground, then opens the meeting window. It takes multiple clicks and open windows to just join a simple meeting, as well as multiple clicks to close all the open windows I don't need. I guess the idea of one click, one windows is too hard to figure out.

I wouldn't be so angry about this if there was a way to just disable some of these anti-features. And it's never just one thing. It when you use multiple applications during the day and you can never get into any kind of flow. It's just interruption after interruption, with zero regard to cohesiveness.

It's unfortunate that some UI/UX designers really do believe that the stuff that the FAANGs are doing is good design, because they end up perpetuating it through other software with little regard to the user or context.

The MongoDBCompass client comes to mind. It's a gigantic beast of an Electron application that takes almost 30 seconds to load up on first start. Simple things like CTRL-A will not select all the text in a textbox, but the entire rendered webpage instead. Or double-clicking some value in a document will shift the interface around and put it into editing mode, when all you want to do is just copy a value.

I have it on good authority from the MongoDB Compass product manager that latest versions of Compass load in around 5 seconds :-) Still an Electron app.

God, I hope so.

I've been going back to Robo3T lately. Sure, it has it's own UI/UX issues, but it doesn't feel like I'm fighting the tool all the time on really basic UI/UX stuff. And it loads up in less than a second. Never thought I'd see the day where I'd actual prefer a Java desktop app over something else.