Products · Product
DrRacket
Raised as a usability problem by 21 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2010–2025), in 14 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
- 1IDE is very laggy for serious projectsUnreviewed
Every issue, all time, most people first
IDE is very laggy for serious projectsUnreviewed
20102026- IDE feels unintuitive, clunky and weird to the user2025-11-23
- IDE is too slow and memory heavy to use on modest hardware2014-12-04
- IDE is very laggy, making it hard to use for serious projects2014-04-16
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 21 complaints
- Must dig through language menu to disable debugging for speed2025-11-23
- IDE feels unintuitive, clunky and weird to the user2025-11-23
- Strange lines appear at 125% DPI, making the editor effectively unusable2020-11-28
- Scrolling becomes slow and flickery in a 225-line source file2019-08-30
- Scrolling is slow, buttons give no feedback, and close-window hotkey fails on some windows2019-08-08
- Right-clicking tabs shows no menu and tabs may lack close buttons2019-08-08
- Indentation API is obtuse, producing huge blocks of closing parens on one line2019-07-23
- UI freezes during loops and window resize jumps and glitches2019-05-02
- DrRacket is not very good for development, so the commenter wants LSP-based editor support2019-01-31
- UI freezes during heavy or non-terminating code; stop button does nothing, forcing quit2019-01-31
- Syntax highlighting is very slow and hard to turn off2015-03-27
- Scrolling through code stalls for about 30 seconds in paren matching2015-03-26
- Scrolling a 500-line file is painfully slow on an older laptop2014-12-05
- Becomes unresponsive from frequent GC pauses, shown by a recycling icon2014-12-04
- IDE is too slow and memory heavy to use on modest hardware2014-12-04
- Harder to customize than Emacs, according to the commenter2014-11-24
- No keyboard shortcut to switch focus between REPL and editor panes2014-04-16
- IDE is very laggy, making it hard to use for serious projects2014-04-16
- Freezes for a second on each use; memory-heavy evaluations make it unresponsive2013-08-11
- DrRacket is extremely slow and short keys don't work on Ubuntu netbook2011-11-10
- Couldn't find how to get previous line; only discoverable via documentation using Esc-P2010-06-09