Every programmer aims not only to squeeze every performance bit from the software but also from the software they use on a daily basis. The IDE is one such tool. There are many IDE's out there but a few have managed to crack into every programmer's toolset. One is VSCode. A Mirosoft product, it has managed to hold its forte for years as any programmer's top IDE choice. Comes with a debugger, terminal, linters, source code formatter and an extensive extensions library. And its free!

The dark side of VSCode is that due to its Electron JS base it is a RAM hog. Just firing it up and a Gigabyte of your precious RAM will be gone. If you are on an under-powered machine you could potentially have a slow machine due to just this.

The good thing is that there are lightweight IDEs that aim to offer the same features as VSCode but will use very little of your system resources. Here are some we use (and some we have ever tested) alongside VSCode. 

Zed is a newcomer. Written in Rust it's aim is to offer the same features as VSCode but with a lighter footprint. Its UI looks fresh. Its settings are extensive. Its terminal, pretty good. Its "Explorer" dialog follows the native OS look-and-feel. Its inbuilt lexers work very well. It's major strength is that it works very well when coding Rust projects. The downsides:

• It was originally created for Mac OS and Linus. The Windows version came after public demand.
• It's final install can be a bit huge at 400MB but its RAM footprint sits at slightly greater than 100MB when you open several windows.
• A tiny issue: when you first launch it you can only see the menu links when you hover on the Zed logo but this can be switched off in its settings.
• Small extensions ecosystem.
• And why was the "phpactor" failing when you open PHP files? Might be a small bug. 

Written in Free Pascal, CudaText is fast and lightweight IDE. It has portable versions that you can use if you do not install anything. The portable ZIP package is at 16MB and once you fire it up the RAM usage is only 80MB with one window open. The terminal works well. The little awesome feature it has is that when it opens a source code file with no corresponding syntax highlighter it will prompt you to download the lexer right within the IDE itself. And it has a Twig lexer; an exception amongst all the IDE's we've used. The downsides with it is that:
It lacks solid auto-suggest by default but this can be provided via LSP integration.

• The UI looks dated but this is due to its hacking back to the retro-UI concepts.
• Very few extensions.
• No AI integrations just yet.
• The terminal works in an uncommon way. For example, you do not type into the terminal directly. Instead, you have to type the commands on a small input field that it right under the terminal panel.
• CudaText's terminal does not just handle the commands you input into it. It also streams some background operation logs which can be a bit annoying. 

We wrote a blog post on this little IDE. Its install packages are pretty small. For example, the portable ZIP archives are less than 30MB in size. Everything runs pretty well once you launch. Since it is written in C++ it manages to use the system resources pretty well. Syntax highlighting works right out of the box. Downsides:

• Very small extensions ecosystem.
• Uses its own "File Explorer" dialog rather than the one offered by the native OS which can be confusing.
• No AI integrations just yet.
• Lacks auto-suggest by default. LSP integration comes in handy here if you want this.
• The UI does not look pretty enough as compared to modern IDEs but can be improved if you use the heavier weight of the "DejaVuSansMono-Bold" font that it comes with. 

Like Zed, Lapce is a Rust coded IDE. It has portable versions. Its portable ZIP archives is a 16MB package. It's also fast and responsive with RAM usage hovering around 70MB - 80MB when one window is open. It's downsides:

• Very small extensions ecosystem.
• It's menu bar is not intuitive.
• Syntax highlighting seems broken. To achieve solid syntax highlighting one needs to code their own parsers.
• No AI integrations just yet.
• Lacks solid auto-suggest. 

The final IDE that we tested: LiteXL. LiteXL is a slightly more advanced version of the Lite IDE. It's primary goal is to incorporate some of the IDE features that the Lite version lack. Its install packages are pretty small with its portable ZIP archives being a mere 2.5MB. It's coded in Lua and really fast when using it. Its major cons are:

• The "File/Folder Explorer" is confounding. Instead of the usual click-and-pick, LiteXL requires you to type into a field to search and open files and folders.
• No AI integrations just yet.
• Lacks auto-suggest.
• Very small extensions ecosystem.

While VSCode still deserves the flak it gets for its system resources usage these lightweight alternatives do have long way to go before reaching its state. Only Zed achieves the "Best VSCode alternative" to us. Still, we'll keep watching to see how they grow over time.