Don’t overlook these open-source editors that outperform VS Code in key ways
When you look at the vast, ever-changing world of software development, choosing a code editor is probably the most personal and important choice a developer makes. VS Code is a great place to start, but it has so many limitations and privacy issues that you might end up looking for alternatives.
Before you automatically choose the mainstream option, take a minute to review open source alternatives. These targeted, community-driven projects can transform your coding experience from simple productivity to something hyperefficient.
Neovim for faster coding
Neovim is a highly customizable open source text editor focused on faster coding through hyperefficiency, speed and minimal resource usage. Building on Vim, it uses a powerful modal editing system that allows complex and quick edits without leaving the keyboard home row. This keyboard-centric philosophy turns editing into a command language.
The setup uses Lua, which uses modular, dynamic, and high-performance configurations, with vanilla startup times as fast as 25ms. Neovim integrates the Language Server Protocol for smart features like autocomplete, real-time diagnostics, and code refactoring, essentially turning the minimalist editor into a powerful IDE.
Tools like Treesitter help understand structural code, improve highlighting, and provide advanced features like incremental text selection. Advanced productivity features include macros for automation and text objects (like ciw and dab) for precise editing. Neovim is ideal for developers who want a highly customized, simple and powerful editor, and even for those working on Linux.
Zed for faster rendering
Zed is a revolutionary open source code editor developed by the original creators of Atom. Built on Rust for performance, Zed is a minimalist, high-performance coding experience that remains lightweight and uses minimal system resources, and can make you a better programmer.
Zed’s flagship feature is its GPU-based custom UI framework. This architecture handles rendering like a video game, sending the entire editor window to be rasterized directly to the GPU. This is essential because modern displays refresh up to 120 times per second, requiring a tight delay of 8.33 milliseconds per frame. Zed consistently addresses this, achieving mathematically lower per-pixel keystroke latency than VS Code can support.
Beyond speed, Zed is powerful because it bundles features that typically require extensions. This includes built-in AI integration (supporting models such as GPT, Claude and GitHub Copilot) and full native real-time collaboration with multi-cursor editing, team channels and integrated audio communication, making pair programming seamless.
Pulsar for easier UI management
Pulsar is a community-run hackable text editor derived from the discontinued Atom. It maintains Atom’s goal of being an uncompromising combination of hacking and usability. Pulsar works well because it exposes the entire interface as a document object model. This allows you to restructure and style the interface using standard CSS, JavaScript, or Less files, which are usually restricted in editors like VS Code.
You can customize themes and layouts, write style sheets to adjust sidebar transparency, status bar height, gutter colors or slider appearance by editing configuration files in the hidden .pulsar directory. This hacking ability extends beyond visuals to basic behaviors that can be modified, and UI themes can replicate the appearance of other IDEs.
Pulsar benefits from Atom’s vast ecosystem of compatible packages, with over 10,000 community packages for features like Markdown previews, Git integration, and running Jupyter kernels. Keep in mind that because it runs on the Electron framework, Pulsar is resource intensive compared to competitors like Neovim or Zed. However, the focus on flexibility in the detailed, community-driven user interface makes up for this.
VSCodium for strict privacy workflows
VSCodium is an open source editor featuring the versatile VS Code environment with a strict privacy workflow. Standard Visual Studio code is built on MIT-licensed Code – OSS source code, but is released by Microsoft under a proprietary license, including default telemetry and proprietary elements.
VSCodium is a community project that uses special build scripts to clone VS Code source code and remove all Microsoft customizations, including telemetry and tracking. The result is a clean binary, fully MIT licensed. This addresses developers’ distrust of the official Microsoft version and is definitely worth a try.
It fixes compliance for high-security or privacy-critical environments by disabling telemetry by default. Basically, you get the exact same powerful editing experience as VS Code without compromising data privacy. Its privacy is so reliable that other open source projects, like Lean4Code, rely on VSCodium to ensure that telemetry is disabled by default for their users.
Geany for low-resource workflows
Geany has an excellent reputation as an ideal open source editor for anyone who needs a low-resource workflow. It is built using the Scintilla editing component and GTK. Geany is specifically designed to have very short loading times and does not rely heavily on external libraries. This type of efficient architecture is actually the main reason why it works so well for developers using older or perhaps less powerful hardware, like a Raspberry Pi or an older laptop that only has 4GB of RAM or less.
Geany uses less than 50MB, and sometimes even up to 13-20MB when in memory. Even though it uses very few resources, Geany still comes with essential development tools ready to use.
This includes syntax highlighting for over 50 programming languages, symbol lists that help you navigate very large files, simple project management features, and a handy built-in terminal emulator so you can compile and run code instantly. It also receives regular updates.
CudaText for gigantic file workflows
CudaText is an open source text editor written in Object Pascal. CudaText can instantly handle huge data files, like massive SQL dumps or multi-gigabyte log files. This would block or disable features of standard editors such as VS Code (50MB tokenization limit).
If a file is larger than 500 MB, the editor asks you if you want to open it in its dedicated Binary/Hex viewer. This viewer can handle files of unlimited size because it only loads the visible part of the file into memory, remaining fast even with files up to 10 GB.
To edit slightly smaller but still very large files (over 2 MB), CudaText uses lightweight lexers instead of the full “normal” lexer for syntax highlighting. These only process visible lines, which ensures that it works properly.
Don’t think of every solution as a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, you should think about what you need for your project. Stop settling for something that’s just good enough and start tailoring your editor to the fundamental requirements of what you need.
These alternatives don’t just mimic the features of a top-tier editor. The editors above can go beyond VS Code in specialized and focused ways that can truly make coding more efficient and a better overall experience.
