I start my code editor maybe once or twice a day, so the launch speed does not even register
RAM and computers in general are so cheap that I just max out every laptop configuration I buy. If you’re a programmer and will use a machine for work spending $3-4k every couple years should not be a problem, we’re paid very well and should therefore use the best tools we can find.
I start my main editor (with the shortcuts I like and all) every time I write (or edit) a commit message. And back when I used Mutt, every time I wrote an email as well. (Now I’m using Thunderbird, but I did like the ability to use my preferred text editor everywhere.)
RAM is cheap at the individual level. But if the entire world needs to go from 16GB to 32GB or whatever, the sheer volume of the resulting electronic waste does not exactly increase my faith in humanity.
Some valuable advice I got about Emacs after switching from Vim is that it's not really a text editor, it's more like an operating system. You shouldn't need to reboot the OS between saving a file and commiting it. I typically only start Emacs once, then do everything from inside it. That being said, it's a very different workflow from Vim or VSCode, and not everyone's favorite way to work.
I even got it setup so I open multiple projects in the same single instance, and slightly change the background color based on what root directory a file is in. This way I don't get turned around when working in both a client and server, or producer and consumer.
I've configured $EDITOR to start `emacsclient "$@" -a ""` with necessary arguments (I get emacs frame instantly when necessary).
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4458800/how-to-use-one-i...
JetBrain's IDEs are extremely slow and memory intensive - well beyond VSC and ST - and yet, complaints are always directed at VSC.
I like to be able to edit new text files instantly, and the simple, pragmatic solution, is to keep an editor always open in the background.
If I care about that, I’ll probably care about Electron using hundreds of megabytes of RAM I shouldn’t even have to buy in the first place. It’s thinking like this that make people say sad things like "16GB of RAM is a bit tight nowadays, maybe you should go up to 32".
(Edit: to people who think buying a bit more RAM is no big deal: remember that our resources are finite, that computers are one of the most polluting industries out there, and the climate clock is ticking.)