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Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

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Re: Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

#151

Post by eridius »

cheerlessbog wrote: post #147
eridius wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VSCode has a ton of extensions but very frequently there's no good information about which extensions you should actually use, and whether you need to configure them to get the best behavior. For example, the other day I went to install a GraphQL extension for syntax highlighting and there was something like a half-dozen competing extensions, with no good way of figuring out why I should use one versus the other. I e…

The VS Code extensions manager shows a star rating, download count, extension description, a list of the commands they expose, often the popular extensions have animated gifs showing how they work. What else are you looking for? For example when I installed VS Code I needed a Git extension. There are zillions but only two or three that are clearly ahead of the pack and it only took a few minutes to try each one.

What I'd really like to see is "date this extension was last updated", and ideally a full changelog. If I see 2 extensions that claim to do the same thing, with similar star ratings, where one isn't being maintained anymore but the other is, there's no way to tell from the extension browser that one of them is still under active development and the other isn't. Download counts are nice but they're also totals, they don't tell me about recent activity, so e.g. if one is an old extension and one is a new extension, the old extension is going to have a higher download count regardless of the relative quality of the two extensions. So "date this extension was last updated" as well as a "recent download count" would go a long way toward making the extension browser easier to use.

Re: Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

#152

Post by not_kurt_godel »

xfer wrote: post #49
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of the hundreds of devs I've worked with, I can think of exactly two who use(d) vim to edit code with any regularity. Both are fairly proficient above-average devs overall, but I'm pretty sure they also use IDEs heavily and only use vim for quick things. Beyond a certain level of codebase complexity, there is simply no way to do the job with a text editor, even with fancy macros. Vim is an elegant tool, but is si…

Would you mind being a bit more specific than using vague language and analogy? What are all these modern development tasks?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19656115

Re: Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

#153

Post by black-tea »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #149
black-tea wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What planet are you people living on? It's like you just whack the word "modern" on the front, stick your hands up and say "haha, you couldn't understand, grandad". Programmers have been doing these things since the beginning of time.

I programmed exclusively with text editors for a number of years. Of course you can do anything in a text editor that you can do in a modern IDE as long as you have patience. I would even go so far as to say that having the experience of using a text editor instead of an IDE is a valuable one; certain types of edits really can be done much more efficiently in vim than an IDE so it's an excellent tool to have at your…

In terms of undoing, I use git and I could undo it with just a few keystrokes. As for the refactoring, yeah, you're right, that stuff would be difficult. I'll keep it in mind if I ever do need to do that stuff. It hasn't happened yet, though.

Re: Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

#154

Post by xfer »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #149
black-tea wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What planet are you people living on? It's like you just whack the word "modern" on the front, stick your hands up and say "haha, you couldn't understand, grandad". Programmers have been doing these things since the beginning of time.

I programmed exclusively with text editors for a number of years. Of course you can do anything in a text editor that you can do in a modern IDE as long as you have patience. I would even go so far as to say that having the experience of using a text editor instead of an IDE is a valuable one; certain types of edits really can be done much more efficiently in vim than an IDE so it's an excellent tool to have at your…

> Meanwhile, merely performing a simple pure-text find-replace across multiple files using vim and emacs is a chore.

It is not, i do that fine in emacs. Half of your list can be done with regex replace. Things like extract and refactor needs language specific tooling that can be done with text editor too(see LSP). And some stuff on your list doesn't even apply to other languages that they have community support for e.g. Rust.

But sure Jetbrains has put lot of effort on these tools for a few languages that you can certainly benefit for a large project. Outside of that good luck using it for any other language.

Re: Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

#155

Post by hibbelig »

xfer wrote: post #154
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I programmed exclusively with text editors for a number of years. Of course you can do anything in a text editor that you can do in a modern IDE as long as you have patience. I would even go so far as to say that having the experience of using a text editor instead of an IDE is a valuable one; certain types of edits really can be done much more efficiently in vim than an IDE so it's an excellent tool to have at your…

> Meanwhile, merely performing a simple pure-text find-replace across multiple files using vim and emacs is a chore. It is not, i do that fine in emacs. Half of your list can be done with regex replace. Things like extract and refactor needs language specific tooling that can be done with text editor too(see LSP). And some stuff on your list doesn't even apply to other languages that they have community support for e…

I don't see how they could be done with regexes. It seems to me that most of them require class hierarchy analysis so that you don't touch the wrong method that just happens to have the same name.

Re: Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

#156

Post by hibbelig »

black-tea wrote: post #32
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of the hundreds of devs I've worked with, I can think of exactly two who use(d) vim to edit code with any regularity. Both are fairly proficient above-average devs overall, but I'm pretty sure they also use IDEs heavily and only use vim for quick things. Beyond a certain level of codebase complexity, there is simply no way to do the job with a text editor, even with fancy macros. Vim is an elegant tool, but is si…

If I can't do a "modern development task" with emacs or vim and a smattering of standard Unix tools, then I question the sanity of said task. At the end of the day we're editing text. Plain text has stood the test of time exactly because you can process it with tools that everyone knows and have been around for decades. If you find yourself needing special purpose, proprietary tools to handle your code base then you…

Sane or not, it pays the bills...

It really does help to get a reminder from the IDE regarding which methods exist and what their parameter lists are. For C, ctags works well enough I guess and we can complete function names that way. But for Java and C#, I can't imagine that going well.

Re: Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

#157

Post by not_kurt_godel »

xfer wrote: post #154
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I programmed exclusively with text editors for a number of years. Of course you can do anything in a text editor that you can do in a modern IDE as long as you have patience. I would even go so far as to say that having the experience of using a text editor instead of an IDE is a valuable one; certain types of edits really can be done much more efficiently in vim than an IDE so it's an excellent tool to have at your…

> Meanwhile, merely performing a simple pure-text find-replace across multiple files using vim and emacs is a chore. It is not, i do that fine in emacs. Half of your list can be done with regex replace. Things like extract and refactor needs language specific tooling that can be done with text editor too(see LSP). And some stuff on your list doesn't even apply to other languages that they have community support for e…

Good luck with regex replace for most of these operations. Seriously, you're gonna need a lot of it to do these things correctly and consistently, if you can even do them at all. And even then it will be about 10-100+x the time and mental overhead that it could be with an IDE.

Re: Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

#158

Post by not_kurt_godel »

black-tea wrote: post #153
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I programmed exclusively with text editors for a number of years. Of course you can do anything in a text editor that you can do in a modern IDE as long as you have patience. I would even go so far as to say that having the experience of using a text editor instead of an IDE is a valuable one; certain types of edits really can be done much more efficiently in vim than an IDE so it's an excellent tool to have at your…

In terms of undoing, I use git and I could undo it with just a few keystrokes. As for the refactoring, yeah, you're right, that stuff would be difficult. I'll keep it in mind if I ever do need to do that stuff. It hasn't happened yet, though.

Lol, k. Good luck.

Re: Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

#159

Post by cheerlessbog »

eridius wrote: post #151
cheerlessbog wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The VS Code extensions manager shows a star rating, download count, extension description, a list of the commands they expose, often the popular extensions have animated gifs showing how they work. What else are you looking for? For example when I installed VS Code I needed a Git extension. There are zillions but only two or three that are clearly ahead of the pack and it only took a few minutes to try each one.

What I'd really like to see is "date this extension was last updated", and ideally a full changelog. If I see 2 extensions that claim to do the same thing, with similar star ratings, where one isn't being maintained anymore but the other is, there's no way to tell from the extension browser that one of them is still under active development and the other isn't. Download counts are nice but they're also totals, they d…

That makes sense. maybe you could suggest it to them, if nobody did already.

Re: Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

#160

Post by not_kurt_godel »

hibbelig wrote: post #155
xfer wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile, merely performing a simple pure-text find-replace across multiple files using vim and emacs is a chore. It is not, i do that fine in emacs. Half of your list can be done with regex replace. Things like extract and refactor needs language specific tooling that can be done with text editor too(see LSP). And some stuff on your list doesn't even apply to other languages that they have community support for e…

I don't see how they could be done with regexes. It seems to me that most of them require class hierarchy analysis so that you don't touch the wrong method that just happens to have the same name.

Yeah, exactly. Every time I try doing these things with regex there winds up being some edge case where something that should have been picked up isn't or vice versa. Then there are ambiguous cases of references in comments and non-code files for which IDEA provides a very straightforward UI experience to include or exclude by various categories or on a case-by-case basis.

Even in the best case scenario where regex works, you've still spent unnecessary mental overhead writing regex, a tool that is so difficult to use properly that it is the textbook example of being a 'solution' that causes more problems than it solves. Why subject oneself to such unnecessary hassle?

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