It still astounds me that people actually use "lightweight" and "fast" to describe vscode these days. How times change.

Compared to the competition. I don’t use VI or EMacs. I compare code to Visual Studio Pro 2022 or any Jetbrains product.

It feels lightweight and snappy when opening and loading a new project, opening individual files, and searching through a repo.

I will say though that Jetbrains Idea and Rider are getting much better, but vscode is free whereas those are quite expensive. So if I can get 90% of the functionality for 100% less cost, I will do it.

I second GP. My point of comparison isn't just Emacs, but also Visual Studio 2015 and 2017, as used for C++. The editor in VS feels snappy, in this general and hard to pinpoint way that lets you easily tell apart a native app from an Electron one. Conversely, despite being reasonably performant (for modern standards), it still feels a little heavy.

I don't know what it is exactly, but I know I'm very sensitive to it. That's the main reason I rarely use VS Code, despite being more feature-packed than VC++ (or, along a few dimensions, even my Emacs) - extra features are nice, but not worth the ongoing discomfort I'd feel with every single key press.

My current hypothesis is that VS Code (and JetBrains IDEs too, so it's not strictly an Electron thing) tends to do too much stuff asynchronously at the same time, making execution times of most actions highly variable and potentially unreliable. The variability usually isn't huge in absolute terms - it's just big enough to be annoying.