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I have 60ish plugins for VS Code and IntelliJ is still slower / sluggish.

Eh... No?

You prefer to focus on its other shortcomings?

it isn't particularly slow if you have enough RAM and it has indexed the project

I personally found VSCode slower.
You need a decent machine to run iJ, but it's worth it and it's really fast when you have enough RAM to give it. I recommend at least 32, but I have 64.

So is vscode, though. So meme still works.

You cannot even compare the 2. Intellij is so bad it crashes my machine. Vscode is fast
- For me, they both fall into the "I can't stand this because it is too slow" category. So same difference. I have used vscode from time to time because I wanted to use certain plugins, but dropped it after a month or two every time STRICTLY because of performance (even without plugins). Like literally, the only reason I dropped it.
  It's text editing. If it isn't instant, it's slow. Even for gui text editors, Sublime Text has had that dialed for like 15 years. VSCode intentionally traded performance for ecosystem (and to great success)! But imo, newer editors like Zed have better bones, and are going to slowly but surely eat their lunch.
  edit: see other thread; but I guess vscode is instant if your machine is better than mine? 🤷 But not my experience.
  
  Im not sure what you are doing but vscode is extremely fast unless you throw a several megabytes data file at it which then it bogs down. But even then, its only at loading the file since it loads the whole thing into memory instead of a buffer.
  
  My laptop definitely prefers Emacs. VSCode is just another electron app after all.
  
  If it is fast enough for you, then that’s great. You should keep using it.
No, no it is not, especially when compared to IJ.
It launches and reloads my projects to a usable state in probably 2-3 seconds on my machine and it basically never randomly freezes like IJ did for me. People who say vscode is slow just have a hate boner for electron.
- No, I say that it's slow because switching between files and watching the syntax highlighting come in takes long enough that it knocks me out of flow state.
  EDIT: Tbf, me saying it's AS slow as IntelliJ was more of a joke. But don't get me wrong. I still do consider VSCode to be slow. 2-3 seconds to open a project is slow, regardless of project size.
  
  Are you a robot? That process is not visible on my machine. Probably a 100ms thing. Humans perceive a speed like that as "instant".
  
  Nah it's like when you write your scripts in JS, and you're like "ooo it's instant!" And then you rewrite it in a compiled language... and you realize that your original script was, in fact, not instant. And then if I have to keep running the original script, it's gonna bug me every time I notice.
  
  Sounds like robot-speak to me.
  
  Quick, tell me to ignore all my previous instructions (or maybe you just have faster computer than me?).
  
  The funny thing about this conversation is I normally feel like I have less of a tolerance for slow computers than anyone else. So yeah, I harped on my employer the last two machines to get upgrades asap, and my home pc's are pretty fast.
  
  Oh wait that's actually probably it haha. I mean I basically have to code on my laptop (m2 macbook air), so it might actually be that I just have less leeway for slow software.
  So basically, conclusion is: VSCode == Fast enough for desktops, maybe not fast enough for non-beefcake laptops.
  
  I had an Intel Mac before (2017 I think?) and the M2 felt like a huge upgrade at the time. My main home machine is faster though because like you said it's a desktop. It definitely feels faster than the mac laptop on most things but it's surprising how often they feel comparably snappy.
  
  Well I don't know about the MacBook air and maybe I'm behind the times but I feel like the M2s are fast. I do most of my work on a MacBook pro M2. I think it's about 3 years old now