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0 pointsrococode5y ago0 comments

To me, VSCode competes with IDEs, Sublime competes with text editors. Startup speed accounts for a solid 95% of that distinction. If I need to make a quick edit to a file or write down a temporary (but reasonably persistent) note, the only tools I've tried that let me do that in less than 3 seconds are Sublime, Notepad, and Notepad++. Among those choices, Sublime is the clear winner in overall usefulness and functionality.

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10 comments · 10 top-level

yashap5y ago

Not just startup speed, but speed/efficiency, period. I use Sublime a lot to manipulate decently large csv, json, etc. files. Multi-cursor text wrangling still works well even with 10s of thousands of cursors, VSCode chokes hard way before that.

zumu5y ago

VSCode is much much faster than the popular IDEs (namely, IntelliJ) in my experience.

I'd say it occupies a middle point between full IDE and text editor.

3 more replies

sriku5y ago

Settled into neovim for startup speed. My VSCode editor has vim keys too, so ... ohm! :)

edit: My only gripe with VSCode currently is that it seems too eager to correct my typing.

2 more replies

Arainach5y ago

I don't understand the startup time issue. Tools I use regularly like VS Code, IntelliJ, etc. are constantly running on my machine. I pay their startup cost once per reboot. Once they're running, they open files* as fast as Sublime for me. There maybe other use cases, but startup time feels pointless to me.

*files of sizes I work work. I don't care about gigabyte-sized files; if I do, vim or my existing ST3 license are good enough.

cdmckay5y ago

Maybe I'm weird, but I don't usually close VS Code, so this isn't an issue for me.

1 more reply

systematical5y ago

Agreed, it's nice and fast. Sublime is my go to for notes, storing quick tidbits, quick macros (this has saved me lots of time), data editing, little bits of quick code, and SQL scratch pad. There is probably a ton more I could be using it for.

greyman5y ago

For me, I use Goland and Pycharm as IDE, and VS Code as editor. I also used Sublime, but found that VS Code somehow surpassed it, and startup speed is also very fine (if you have strong computer :-)).

Siira5y ago

`emacsclient` gives you the best of both worlds. Instant startup, with as much added sugar as you can stomach.

beermonster5y ago

Same. I don’t tend to need an IDE all that often. More often I want to read code and I need something that opens up FAST with good support for a WIDE variety of languages out of the box. ST ticks that box for me.

SavantIdiot5y ago

That's an excellent point. There really is a continuum that I overlooked.

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