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.