Vscode is very snappy for me on less powerful machine Ryzen 3900 (Ubuntu, X-windows). I have a good experience running multiple instances, big workspaces and 70+ actively used extensions and even more that I selectively enable when I want them. It's only the MS C# support that behaves poorly for me (intentional sabotage?!).
I wonder if you have some problem on your machine/setup? I'd investigate it - try some benchmarking. It's open source so you don't me afraid looking under the hood to see what's happening.
> I'll save a file and it will be like jank...jank... File Save participants running with a progress bar.
I don't see that at all. Saving is instant/transparent to me.
There is so much possible configuration that could cause an issue e.g. if you have "check on save" from an an extension then you enter "js jank land" where plugins take plugins that take plugins all configured in files with dozens of options, weird rules that change format every 6 months e.g. your linter might take plug-ins from your formatter, your test framework, your ui test framework, hot reload framework, your bundler, your transpile targets...
If saving is really slow then I would suspect something like an extension is wandering around node_modules. Probing file access when you see jank might reveal that.
I have that kind of fast, smooth experience with VS Code, too - but that is when I open my small hobby monorepo, or only when I don't leave it open all day. When I open a big work monorepo (250k files, maybe 10GB in size, or 200MB when you exclude all the node_modules and cache dirs, the slowness isn't instant but it becomes slow after "a while" — an hour, or two.
I do actually regularly benchmark it and test with no/minimal extensions, because I share responsibility for tooling for my team, but the fact that it takes an hour or two to repro makes that sort of too cumbersome to do. (We don't mandate using any specific editor, either, but most of my team uses VS Code so I am always trying to help solve pain points if I can.)
And its not just the file saves that become slow — it's anything, or seemingly so. Like building the auto-import suggestions, or jumping to the definition by ⌘-clicking a Symbol. Right after launch, its snappy. After 2-3 hours and a couple hundred files having been opened, it's click, wait, wait... jump.
Eventually, even typing will lag or stutter. Quitting and restarting it brings it back to snappy-ish for a while.
It is true that maybe we have some configuration that I don't change, so even with no or minimal extensions, there might be something about our setup triggers the problems. Like we have a few settings defined at the monorepo root. But very few.
But before you think aha! the formatter! know that I have tried every formatter under the sun over the past 5 years. (Because Prettier gave my team a lot of problems. Although we now use it again.)
We have a huge spelling dictionary. I regularly disable the spelling extension though, but what if there was an edge case bug where having more than 1000 entries in your "cSpell.words" caused a memory leak on every settings lookup, even when the extension wasn't running? I mean... it's software, anything is possible.
But I suspect it is the built-in support for TypeScript itself, and that yeah, as you work with a very large number of files it has to build out a model of the connections between apps and libs and that just causes everything to slow down.
But then, like I mentioned nothing else I've seen quite has the depth of TypeScript support. Or the core set of killer features (to us), which is mainly the remote/SSH stuff for offloading the actual dev env to some beefy machine down the hall (or across the globe).
To us, these things are worth just having to restart the app every few hours. It's kinda annoying, sure, but the feature set is truly fantastic.
> Eventually, even typing will lag or stutter. Quitting and restarting it brings it back to snappy-ish for a while.
Hmm. I've not experienced that. Something is leaking which can be identified/fixed. There are quick things you could do to narrow it down e.g. restart extension host or the language server or kill background node processes etc.
I generally have it running for weeks... although I do have to use "reload window" for my biggest/main workspace fairly often because rust-analyzer debugging gets screwed up and it's the quickest fix from a keyboard shortcut. I may be not seeing your issue for other reasons :)
FWIW I can recommend "reload window" because it only applies to the instance you have a problem with and restores more state than quit/restart e.g. your terminal windows and their content so it's not intrusive to your flow.
> but the fact that it takes an hour or two to repro makes that sort of too cumbersome to do
Yeah, I know what you mean. I now schedule time for "sharpening my tools" each day and making a deliberate effort to fix issues / create PRs for pain-points. I used to live with problems way too long because "I didn't have time". It's not a wall-clock productivity win.... but the intangibles about enjoying the tools more, less pain, feeling in control and learning from other projects are making me happy.
I wonder if you have some problem on your machine/setup? I'd investigate it - try some benchmarking. It's open source so you don't me afraid looking under the hood to see what's happening.
> I'll save a file and it will be like jank...jank... File Save participants running with a progress bar.
I don't see that at all. Saving is instant/transparent to me.
There is so much possible configuration that could cause an issue e.g. if you have "check on save" from an an extension then you enter "js jank land" where plugins take plugins that take plugins all configured in files with dozens of options, weird rules that change format every 6 months e.g. your linter might take plug-ins from your formatter, your test framework, your ui test framework, hot reload framework, your bundler, your transpile targets...
If saving is really slow then I would suspect something like an extension is wandering around node_modules. Probing file access when you see jank might reveal that.