Electron owns way too much of my disk. It’s time to move on.
I bought into the sexy thoughts of cross platform. I wanted to have the same experience across multiple environments or operating systems. But to do that, you have to sacrifice some element of native experience or performance.
vs.code has been the popular catch-all of cross-platform IDE’s. Just about everyone has used it at some point or another. I’ve kept it and collected a massive set of plugins. I have to do a number of development projects - everything from Markdown, to HCL, to Javascript/Typescript. I’ve not had to dabble in .NET for quite some time (thankfully).
Lately I’ve been on a crusade to get rid of anything that isn’t M1-native. I want the full performance of this M1 Max to the best of it’s ability. That means paring back on things that are typically multi-platform. Sure, vs.code is a “native” binary, but it’s served up with a healthy dose of Electron. Electron has a bad reputation of being a resource hog. A trip through Activity Monitor proves that yes indeed, it’s bloated - and the more plugins I add, the worse it gets.
I’m off on a quest to find something better. So far I’m testing Nova by Panic and Sublime Text. Both have much better performance and resource usage. Sublime Text seems to have a much deeper ecosystem of plugins and support, and it’s damn fast. But Nova is more Mac-like in appearance and the plugins seem to be good enough. Since Nova is limited to 30 days for a trial, I’m going to focus on it for the time being.
What’s your favorite Mac-like IDE? Bonus points if it’s something that coops with the iPad well. Sigh. When will that ever get better?