For any serious programmer an IDE is a must-have tool. Without it can one say they are really a programmer? Let's cut to the chase. VSCode is currently the most popular free IDE in the developer space. Comes with everything you need but there is one major problem with it...

...it is an Electron JS powered desktop application. This comes with huge RAM demands when you use it. Is there an IDE out there that has a small RAM footprint but gives almost similar goodies? Enter ecode. 

The beauty of ecode is that it is written in C++. This makes it really fast when using it since it is able to use the machine capabilities better than VSCode. It boots up quite fast when you click on the executable. It's RAM usage sits at tiny 90MB. Compare that with VS Code that can consume 1GB of RAM once you fire it up. Clicking around the IDE and the response is also pretty fast.

What about the terminal? This is really important if you build the source code. ecode's terminal is also pretty awesome. One of the funny things about the IDE is that on the first run the terminal sits on a split panel rather than the usual bottom horizontal panel. But you can get it to sit at the bottom by fiddling around with the "Settings". 

Now the downsides:

1. The UI looks pretty dated but this is actually because the IDE aims for a retro-UI look. However, you can improve on it by looking at its font settings. TIP: try using the "DejaVuSansMono-Bold" font with a higher font weight and you will get a pretty good looking UI.
2. The "Open File/Folder" does not follow native UI look-and-feel. This is confusing if you are used to the native "File Explorer" dialog.
3. Extremely few extensions. We can forgive it here since it is a newish IDE with a few developers behind it. But if you want an IDE that has every extension for any programming problem then ecode will really disappoint you.
4. Autosuggest/autocomplete is still not out-of-the-box. Autosuggest is very important now since one needs to write code without having to refer to external sources about function declarations or code blocks. However, ecode supports LSP integration just for this.
5. No AI Assistant capabilities just yet.

Other than if you are the adventurous type you can try it out.

Happy coding!