My experience with VS Code is that it has no perceptible lag, except maybe 500ms on startup. I don't doubt people experience this, but I think it comes down to which extensions you enable, and many people enable lots of heavy language extensions of questionable quality. I also use Visual Studio for Windows builds on C++ projects, and it is pretty jank by comparison, both in terms of UI design and resource usage.
I just opened up a relatively small project (my blog repo, which has 175 MB of static content) in both editors and here's the cold start memory usage without opening any files:
- Visual Studio Code: 589.4 MB
- Visual Studio 2022: 732.6 MB
update:
I see a lot of love for Jetbrains in this thread, so I also tried the same test in Android Studio: 1.69 GB!
Have you tried Emacs, VIM, Sublime, Notepad++,... Visual Studio and Android Studio are full IDEs, meaning upon launch, they run a whole host of modules and the editor is just a small part of that. IDEs are closer to CAD Software than text editors.
When did they add that? Last time I used it, it was still based on xterm.js.
Also, technically Chromium/Blink has GPU rendering built in for web pages, so everything could run on GPU.
> GPU acceleration driven by the WebGL renderer is enabled in the terminal by default. This helps the terminal work faster and display at a high FPS by significantly reducing the time the CPU spends rendering each frame
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/terminal/appearance#_gpu-...
IMO The next best cross-platform GUI framework is Qt (FreeCAD, QGIS, etc.)
Qt6 can look quite nice with QSS/QStyle themes, these days, and its native affordances are fairly good.
But it's not close. VSCode is nice-looking, to me.
I've been playing around with different GUI approaches for the desktop, and what impresses me the most about Godot is how lightweight and self-contained it can be while still being cross-platform on both ends.
(I've been aware of Qt for like two decades; back in the early 2000s my employer was evaluating such options as Tk, wxWindows, and ultimately settled on Java, I think with AWT. Qt seems to have a determined survival niche in "embedded systems that aren't android"?)
