6 ms·

This might be one of those things like monitor refresh rate where you can only really tell the difference if you've experienced the better version for a while,

This might be one of those things like monitor refresh rate where you can only really tell the difference if you've experienced the better version for a while, but I haven't ever felt slowed down by the speed of VS Code.

madeofpalk 3y ago
Every now and then I switch back to Apple's Terminal app, and I'm blown away at how much faster it is at just typing than iTerm it is, and how much nicer that is.
- bbkane 3y ago
  I switched to iTerm2 a few years ago due to blurry fonts on zoom with Terminal.app . Wonder if that's still a problem? A few months ago I switched to WezTerm and, after some config wrestling, I've been very happy using it (https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/tree/master/wezterm https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/tree/master/wezterm).
snet0 3y ago
I do think it's something like that. Things can quickly get to the speed that feels "fast enough" that they don't feel subjectively slow, but can still be sped up by a couple orders of magnitude. If you Ctrl-F something and it takes a few hundred ms, you probably don't feel like it was slow, but in reality the "speed-of-light" for this operation was probably orders of magnitude faster than it happened on your device. Once you experience something close to the theoretical speed, it's really hard to go back to something you thought was perfectly fine before. And you start noticing that everything feels slower than it "should".. I think of something like grep, where if I tried to grep a large hierarchy it'd be really slow and I'd sorta reason to myself "well yeah it's a lot of files in a large tree, of course it'll be slow!". Then I installed ripgrep and suddenly what I thought was a reasonable speed was shown to be unreasonably slow!
peoplefromibiza 3y ago
it is actually faster and snappier to use on a beefy M2 max, on the same hardware zed starts up in half the time. the difference is very noticeable. of course it is much less configurable and doesn't work with a lot of things VS Code can do easily. edit: see this comment for a much better explanation than mine of what I originally meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39409763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39409763
- ncruces 3y ago
  Startup would have to be terrible for me to bother. VS Code starts in under a couple of seconds, and I have it open all day long; once open, other windows open even faster than that. If it took any longer than a couple of seconds, I'd start blaming the extensions other editors won't have.
  - cmiller1 3y ago
    In a perfect world startup times would be indistinguishable from instantaneous.
    - ncruces 3y ago
      And for an image previewer I'd care. If I'm opening a codebase with thousands of files, I don't mind to wait a couple of seconds, as long as it's responsive afterwards.
  - peoplefromibiza 3y ago
    > Startup would have to be terrible for me to bother. that's just the first noticeable difference. but there have been instances lately where opening, editing and saving the file took me less time with zed than just open it in VS Code and waiting for it to be ready for inputs > VS Code starts in under a couple of seconds I am talking about relative speed differences. Imagine you open the same code base and the editor is ready in half a second. going back to the "slower" one would be unbearable. now admittedly zed is no way near to the extensibility of VS Code so it is probably doing less and that's where probably much of the speed difference comes from, but it can't really be overlooked once you experienced it.
satvikpendem 3y ago
I have. I have some huge Markdown documents I've needed to load and VSCode cannot render them without becoming super slow. In contrast, vim gets it done.

madeofpalk 3y ago

Every now and then I switch back to Apple's Terminal app, and I'm blown away at how much faster it is at just typing than iTerm it is, and how much nicer that is.

bbkane 3y ago
I switched to iTerm2 a few years ago due to blurry fonts on zoom with Terminal.app . Wonder if that's still a problem? A few months ago I switched to WezTerm and, after some config wrestling, I've been very happy using it (https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/tree/master/wezterm https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/tree/master/wezterm).

snet0 3y ago

I do think it's something like that. Things can quickly get to the speed that feels "fast enough" that they don't feel subjectively slow, but can still be sped up by a couple orders of magnitude. If you Ctrl-F something and it takes a few hundred ms, you probably don't feel like it was slow, but in reality the "speed-of-light" for this operation was probably orders of magnitude faster than it happened on your device. Once you experience something close to the theoretical speed, it's really hard to go back to something you thought was perfectly fine before. And you start noticing that everything feels slower than it "should".. I think of something like grep, where if I tried to grep a large hierarchy it'd be really slow and I'd sorta reason to myself "well yeah it's a lot of files in a large tree, of course it'll be slow!". Then I installed ripgrep and suddenly what I thought was a reasonable speed was shown to be unreasonably slow!

peoplefromibiza 3y ago

it is actually faster and snappier to use on a beefy M2 max, on the same hardware zed starts up in half the time. the difference is very noticeable. of course it is much less configurable and doesn't work with a lot of things VS Code can do easily. edit: see this comment for a much better explanation than mine of what I originally meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39409763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39409763

ncruces 3y ago
Startup would have to be terrible for me to bother. VS Code starts in under a couple of seconds, and I have it open all day long; once open, other windows open even faster than that. If it took any longer than a couple of seconds, I'd start blaming the extensions other editors won't have.
- cmiller1 3y ago
  In a perfect world startup times would be indistinguishable from instantaneous.
  - ncruces 3y ago
    And for an image previewer I'd care. If I'm opening a codebase with thousands of files, I don't mind to wait a couple of seconds, as long as it's responsive afterwards.
- peoplefromibiza 3y ago
  > Startup would have to be terrible for me to bother. that's just the first noticeable difference. but there have been instances lately where opening, editing and saving the file took me less time with zed than just open it in VS Code and waiting for it to be ready for inputs > VS Code starts in under a couple of seconds I am talking about relative speed differences. Imagine you open the same code base and the editor is ready in half a second. going back to the "slower" one would be unbearable. now admittedly zed is no way near to the extensibility of VS Code so it is probably doing less and that's where probably much of the speed difference comes from, but it can't really be overlooked once you experienced it.

satvikpendem 3y ago

I have. I have some huge Markdown documents I've needed to load and VSCode cannot render them without becoming super slow. In contrast, vim gets it done.