I'm very interested in the general perception of VS Code being fast, because for me it's slow enough that it's the main reason I use other editors. Here are a couple of examples:

1. It takes nine times as long as Vim to open a minified JavaScript file, and then format it with Prettier: https://twitter.com/robenkleene/status/1285631026648276993

2. It takes 14 times as long to open an empty text file than BBEdit: https://twitter.com/robenkleene/status/1257724392458661889

Both of the above examples revolve around opening files for the first time, and I suspect a lot of the slowness I perceive is because I open a lot of different projects and source code files when I'm working, and this is a bad use of VS Code.

In practice, VS Code behaves more like a multi-language IDE than a text editor. Slow startup times are generally acceptable in IDEs because you're exchanging speed for power. A programmer should ideally be proficient in both an IDE and a text editor, because they're tools applicable to different problems. E.g., VS Code is a terrible choice for things like analyzing log output, formatting large files, testing isolated snippets of code, or working on source code files that aren't part of the same project. I find this to be a shame because VS Code is flexible enough that it would otherwise be excellent for all of these tasks if it were just more performant for some operations that it struggles with now.