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nxc18today at 5:22 AM2 repliesview on HN

If you work on web tech (and who doesn’t these days?) VS Code has the advantage of using the same tech stack you’re already familiar with. If you need to debug a problem, just open devtools. If you want to run a performance profile, do the same. If you want to fix a bug in the extension you’re using, just open a PR and fix it.

It is a very flexible system and still quite fast and easy to configure. I’ve been trying Zed and WebStorm looking for better alternatives, but it turns out they have their own problems. Zed isn’t nearly as configurable, WebStorm’s config system is an absolute nightmare (xml for days - and constantly changing, mingling actual config with transient state).

People complain that VS Code is slow; perhaps on some metrics and perhaps it is slower than a much less featured system like sublime. But I don’t think it is meaningfully slower in practice than Zed, and they make a lot of compromises to get that edge.


Replies

jotatotoday at 5:30 AM

I’m trying to phrase this to not be “that guy” but have you used Code on large code bases? Vscode on my m2 Mac routinely crashed when doing file search. That is why I switched to zed.

I do miss the configurablity though

bigstrat2003today at 6:06 AM

VSCode's problem isn't that it's slow, it's that it's bloated. It takes a bit over 1GB memory (in my testing) to open the same files that Sublime can do in just 200-300 MB. In my book, it is simply not acceptable to waste my memory like that.