VS Code is technically an Electron app, but it's not the usual lazy resource hog implementation like Slack or something. A lot of work went into making it fast. I doubt you'll find many non-Electron full IDEs that are faster. Look at Visual Studio, that's using a nice native framework and it runs at the speed of fossilized molasses.
VSCode has even less features than Emacs, OOTB. Complaining about full IDEs slowness is fully irrelevant here. Full IDEs provide an end to end experience in implementing a project. Whatever you need, it's there. I think the only plugins I've installed on Jetbrains's ones is IdeaVim and I've never needed something else for XCode.
It's like complaining about a factory's assembly line, saying it's not as portable as the set of tools in your pelican case.
Please take a look at the Emacs documentation sometimes.
VSCode is more popular, which makes it easy to find extensions. But you don’t see those in the Emacs world because the equivalent is a few lines of config.
So what you will see are more like meta-extensions. Something that either solve a whole class of problems, could be a full app, or provides a whole interaction model.
> Please take a look at the Emacs documentation sometimes.
I've used Emacs.
> But you don’t see those in the Emacs world because the equivalent is a few lines of config.
That is really quite false. It's a common sentiment that people spend their lives in their .emacs file. The exact reason I left Emacs was that getting a remote development setup was incredibly fragile and meant I was spending all this time in .emacs only to get substandard results. The worst you do in VS Code is set high-level settings in VS Code or the various extensions.
Nothing in the Emacs world comes close to the remote extensions for SSH and Docker containers that VS Code nor the Copilot and general AI integration. I can simply install VS Code on any machine, login via GitHub, and have all of my settings, extensions, etc. loaded up. I don't have to mess around with cross-platform issues and Git-syncing my .emacs file. Practically any file format has good extensions, and I can embed Mermaid, Draw.io, Figma, etc. all in my VS Code environment.
Now, I'm sure someone will come in and say "but Emacs does that too!". If so, it's likely a stretch and it won't be as easy in VS Code.
In 2025, you really picked Emacs as the hill to die on? Who is under 30 who cares about Emacs in 2025? Few. You might as well argue that most developers should be using Perl 6.
> the only plugins I've installed on Jetbrains's ones
By default, JetBrains' IntelliJ-based IDEs have a huge number of plug-ins installed. If you upgrade from Community Edition to a paid license, the number only increases. Your comment is slightly misleading to me.
Just wait until vi steps into the room. Perhaps we can recreate the Usenet emacs vs vi flame wars. Now, if only '90's me could see the tricked out neovim installs we have these days.
They just made a big song and dance about full updating Visual Studio so it launches in milliseconds and is finally decoupled from all the underlying languages/compilers.
It's still kinda slow for me. I've moved everything but WinForms off it now, though.
VS Code is plenty fast enough. I switched to Zed a few months back, and it's super snappy. Unless you're running on an incredibly resource constrained machine, it mostly comes down to personal preference.
I have always found JetBrains stuff super snappy. I use neovim as a daily driver but for some projects the inference and debugging integration in JetBrains is more robust.
Like writing out of process extensions in compiled languages.
VS is much faster considering it is a full blown IDE not a text editor, being mostly C++/COM and a couple of .NET extensions alongside the WPF based UI.
Load VSCode with the same amount of plugins, written in JavaScript, to see where performance goes.
