I compared NP++ to VS Code at the time. VS Code was nice to use, but it was slower. It was faster than Visual Studio, but that's because VS Code without extensions didn't have language support, etc like VS did.

I find it odd you see otherwise.

And VS 2026 is faster than VS Code these days, now that they spent time optimizing it.

I'm fairly sure VS low performance and responsiveness is caused by their use of WPF for the UI. Never seen a single responsive application written in that toolkit, it's even worse than electron. Not surprised it hasn't taken off outside of enterprises.

It used to be fast before 2010, when they used MFC (or something very similar to it, I don't remember anymore), compiled to native code.