I have not used an IDE since I ditched Turbo Pascal in middle school, but now I am at a place where everyone and their mother uses VS Code and so I’m giving it a shot.
The thing is, I’m finding the “just works” mantra is not true at all. Nothing is working out of the box. And then for each separate extension I have to figure out how to fix it. Or I just give up and circumvent it by using the terminal.
What’s even the point then?
IDK maybe its a matter of getting used to something new, but I was doing fine with just vim and tmux.
Hell no, Emacs and nvim UX is far superior. I won’t ever go back to clicking.
I agree, thought Atom was kind of a fun text editor but silly for being an entire Chrome browser, then it mutated into this intentionally held back IDE where not even developing PowerShell or C# can be done without mucking about first.
There is barely any functionality without add-ins but not because they want to keep the base program light. And it siphons all the data it can get, of course.
It’s pretty clear to me that they don’t want it to be better than Visual Studio proper, so you don’t get a sane menu structure or out of the box functionality. Microsoft made an editor that is somehow more opaque and unintuitive than vi, not because of necessity or for practicality reasons but because it has to be different from the flagship product.
I’d much rather work with Spyder, Netbeans or Eclipse. Or some Jetbrains product. Or Notepad3 + Terminal and a browser.
so you don’t get a sane menu structure
Not saying they shouldn’t have a sane structure, but in 6 years of using VS Code I never cared about menus because everything can and should be accessed through the command palette (F1 / Ctrl+Shift+P).
To me complaining about menus in VS Code sounds like complaining of modes and motions in vi / vim. Maybe the editor is not for you.
vi is the way it is for very good reasons, I don’t really see that with VS Code. Even gVim has menus. You can have both accessibility and flexibility/speed.
I would still try to adapt to it, but the PowerShell experience I had a couple months ago put me off it (and VSCodium) for good. Install IDE, install plug-in, hangs forever until you figure out that the useless error message means you need to install some additional .msi from Microsoft. Blergh.
use linux
Nope, at work, we use JetBrains IDEs and for my personal stuff, I’m using Kate.
Seeing the hype wave for VS Code was so bizarre, like millions of people discovered features that were just bog standard in IDEs for a long time. Two colleagues tried to sell it to me and the features they chose to do so with, were the commit GUI and the embedded terminal.
My best guess is that if you weren’t a programmer, then you didn’t use an IDE and there just wasn’t many good editors on Windows. Like, Notepad++ has been there since forever, but it doesn’t have that many features. And Sublime has been around for a long time, too, but never made it big.
The thing about VSCode is that it was lightweight and modular with the extensions. At least for me.
Lightweight compared to a full-featured IDE, sure, but it starts a whole bloomin’ web browser to render a text editor. That is not lightweight at all, compared to Notepad++, Sublime, Kate, Vim, Emacs etc…
The problem with Sublime is that it’s a paid one, and not everybody wants to pay for something that is perceived by the community as something that should be free and open source.
It’s paid like WinRAR is paid.
Sublime was pretty big before Atom. Atom just had absolutely abysmal startup speeds. Using Atom like an IDE was fine because it stayed open but using it like an editor was awful. Code fixed those problems.
I mostly use VS Code for notes and configuration files. Sometimes Python scripts. I agree with you, it requires a lot of setup. It has replaced Vim for me either way.
Most of my programming is done in IntelliJ, which works mostly out of the box. I’ve also used Visual Studio (not to be confused with VS Code).
I can’t imagine working without a proper IDE for any serious programming anymore. Working without IDE is like self imposed handicap.
Vs codium, which is based on vscode but spyware is stripped out
Since no one told me this, I will trek people:
If you go for codium, be warned that one of the big points of vs code, extensions, gets a lot more of a hassle.
One of the things you lose is access to Microsofts extension store, and they’ve added their own instead, and that one is missing a lot.
If you want extensions from the Microsoft store, you need to download them manually from the website, and keep them updated manually.
This includes the Python extension, so no Python for you (or at least no Pylance ;_;)
VSCodium > VSCode
Well it may absolutely suck, but they’ll tell you
- it’s everywhere
- once you learn a few tricks it’s great
- you’ll get used to a non-intuitive macro and command setup
- adapt your entire workflow around it and you’re fine
- it’s … fast?
- it has such power
The last two are lies. And I was talking about vi here, in the hopes you’ll get it. And like when I first used vi, the best thing was learning there were alternatives.
I use jetbrains’ PyCharm. Work paid for it. It does the things I want it to do (works with docker, git integration, local history, syntax highlighting for every language I use, refactor:rename and move, safe delete, find usages,.find declaration, view library code, database integration, other stuff I’m forgetting)
VSCode isn’t an IDE, although you can kinda make it work like an IDE with extensions.
I use Visual Studio Professional as my IDE at work, but we do a lot of C#.
With these modern extensible text editors the line between IDE and editor is too blurry to really tell. Many things people would agree are IDEs (like Eclipse) are entirely based around a plugin architecture too. I don’t think it’s worth it to split hairs over whether Visual Studio Code and similar programs are or aren’t IDEs. With enough plugins, they’re IDEs. With too few, they aren’t. Where that line is is entirely subjective.
Like (Neo)vim, it’s a PDE: Personalized Development Environment
Props to TJ DeVries for coming up with that term.
I use it because I’m switching between different projects and frameworks a lot. I found that me aligning with expected use patterns was easier than constantly adapting things for my magic setup.
I’m also not a config hound.
Do not use Microsofts Telemetry Studio Code but Code-OSS or VSCodium.
See: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/267
Regarding your question Code is not powerful enough of what we do at work. There we use IntelliJ IDEA. Our frontend guys use Code as it’s enough for them and they usually are not that quality oriented, be it their tools or their product. Sadly mediocre is enough.
Honestly I don’t care about telemetry. I’m not trying to start an argument about it, I’m just explaining to readers that there are still reasons to use VSCodium over Visual Studio Code. Visual Studio Code (the build available) masquerades as open source while having a non-FOSS license. https://code.visualstudio.com/license Also, Microsoft does not allow other programs (like VSCodium or Code - OSS) to access the Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace. Being plugin based, that essentially means all useful functionality in Code-like editors is gated behind a proprietary website you aren’t allowed to access except with a proprietary editor (Visual Studio Code). https://open-vsx.org/about
could you give a couple examples of how vscode degrades quality?
What issues specifically?
It takes maybe 10 minutes to find good extensions and get them set up
VS Code is a great text editor for me. I write Markdown documents, manipulate bulk strings, and diff files with it. Aside from small scratch projects, its consistency and reliability as an IDE is varied for me. It’s far from “just works”, at least for the types of things I do (C, C++, C#, Rust) and isn’t really on my list of editors I’d recommend for those workloads.
You can make it work, but it’s going to require extensive time spent figuring out what extensions to use (and their quirks), ensure that you have a working setup to the language server, and learn how each environment wants you to setup its tasks and launch configurations, if applicable. Unlike larger IDEs like VS or Rider, it doesn’t have a consistent “new project” process either, so you’re on your own for that.
I wonder what troubles you had with rust in vscode. In my experience. I just install the rust-analyzer extension and it works every time.
Plus some (optional) extension to display the available dependency versions in the Cargo.toml.
Maybe debugging can be a bit tricky, but other than that it’s just installing 1 (or 2) extensions.
It’s exactly that: the trickiness around debugging is the main thing that feels like it’s got some barriers compared to a turnkey solution in an IDE. I heard VS Code and Godot was available until I realized that the LSP and debugger for Godot 4.x was unusable for months until the recent refactor.
Don’t get me wrong though, I am totally using VS Code for my Rust projects. It just isn’t a turnkey solution that I’d recommend to someone if they just want to hit “New project” and do the whole write-compile-debug loop without needing to understand anything. (I had also used it a while back prior to rust-analyzer being the main go-to extension, I think…)
I switched to Zed recently. Very basic and definitely is not as feature rich as VSCodium but I’m sure it’ll get better.
Zed looks very promising. There are only 2 things that prevent me from using it.
- The git lens vs code extension
- Rust-analyzer configuration
I’ll keep an eye on zed, but I think most people will stay on VSCode until zed gets feature-rich enough that they won’t miss VSCode.
I mostly use VS Code as a simple text editor with some of the CSV plugins. Though with JetBrains coming out with Fleet I’ve started to use that more. It doesn’t have plugin support yet so it’s not getting a lot of use.
For everything else I use whatever JetBrains IDE fits. For work, it’s mostly IntelliJ, DataGrip, PyCharm, and DataSpell. At home, it’s IntelliJ DataGrip and CLion. I guess I’ve kinda drank the JetBrains KookAid, but to me, it’s worth the subscription to the all products pack. Especially if you are a polyglot since you keep a consistent IDE experience.
As @terrehbyte@ani.social says VS Code is ok for simpe text stuff but I prefer Goland and PyCharm for development. As a Child of TP6 I miss the simplicity of the IDE and the color scheme :)
I don’t think VSCode’s mantra is that it “just works”. It’s definitely a “platform” IDE like Eclipse was.
