The Era of Visual Studio Code • Hacker News Board

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#41

Post by Scarbutt » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 8:05 PM UTC

Kaveren wrote: post #24

laksdjfkasljdf wrote: post #15

VS Code, the text editor, is a trojan horse. Microsoft is selling you into the IDE, in small portions. This is similar to the IBM approach with JAVA last decade(s?). You install a "text editor" for simple things, like code completion. Before you realize you don't even know which compiler you are using or where it came from. You just press F5 and look at convenient break points. And somehow it only runs right on Azure…

> Microsoft is selling you into the IDE, in small portions what are they selling me

Github and Azure integration.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#42

Post by valvar » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 8:05 PM UTC

For those that like Vim, but also like some of the features that VS Code offers, but do not like VS Code itself and/or its Vim integrations or emulations, I must heartily recommend coc.nvim [0]. It's like using a modern IDE, minus the bloat and anti-features which make most of them (including, of course, VS Code) painful to use.

[0] - https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#43

Post by Kranar » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 8:06 PM UTC

laksdjfkasljdf wrote: post #15

VS Code, the text editor, is a trojan horse. Microsoft is selling you into the IDE, in small portions. This is similar to the IBM approach with JAVA last decade(s?). You install a "text editor" for simple things, like code completion. Before you realize you don't even know which compiler you are using or where it came from. You just press F5 and look at convenient break points. And somehow it only runs right on Azure…

Which IDE? If you mean Visual Studio, that's a Windows only product and it's really only good for Windows specific development like C# and MSVC. If you do C# or C++ development on Windows or XBox then you're likely already using Visual Studio and the community edition is a free product for individual use or open source products.

If you mean some future IDE that MS is working on that they plan to evolve VS Code into, I don't see MS trying to sell macOS or Linux users a proprietary dev environment or toolchain. It's certainly possible but your post doesn't provide any justification for that position.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#44

Post by gameswithgo » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 8:06 PM UTC

kushalpandya wrote: post #23

koolba wrote: post #9

VS Code is awesome. If you told me ten years ago my daily driver text editor on Linux would be a Microsoft product, well, you’d have been right. Sane defaults. Snappy interface. Universal UI on multiple OSes that doesn’t suck. First class and best in class TypeScript support. It’s going to be hard to beat, now or five years from now.

My only problem with it is performance when you load large repos and occasionally large files because it is an Electron app eventually. I know the extension ecosystem has thrived just because it is Electron but I wish MS worked on a native editor to achieve it.

the electron overhead is fixed. if it has problems with large repos it wouldn't be due to electron. it would be due to vscode itself or some extension you are suing.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#45

Post by ClikeX » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 8:06 PM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #16

gimboland wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm looking forward to the day when you can have multiple windows open on the same project without going through some horrible kludge. Some of us (!) have more than one monitor and would like, say, to put the debug widgetry over on _this_ one. (Edit: fixed three typos.)

Speaking of which, as a light user of VS Code, is anyone else completely confused by the project / workspace interface? I'm always confused as to what project or workspace I'm in and what file is associated with what workspace, and what mode I'm in. The UX could use some love with the onboarding experience.

I open a new window for each project, so I don't share this pain.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#46

Post by temporama1 » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 8:07 PM UTC

RealStickman_ wrote: post #25

It's interesting how vim and emacs both retained their popularity during the last few years. Probably because they cater to one specific audience.

Who?

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#47

Post by ishcheklein » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 8:08 PM UTC

To my mind VS Code (and not only VS Code, vim and other editors also) not only competes with editors, but with IDEs as well. It's interesting that he doesn't mention JetBrains at all. I'm curious to see if there is a trend of people migrating from it (or not?) and why.

> GitHub’s Codespaces also run VS Code as a web app, this time by spinning up an ad hoc development environment.

This probably can be the first time we'll see people use online code platform for real.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#48

Post by bad_user » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 8:08 PM UTC

kushalpandya wrote: post #23

koolba wrote: post #9

VS Code is awesome. If you told me ten years ago my daily driver text editor on Linux would be a Microsoft product, well, you’d have been right. Sane defaults. Snappy interface. Universal UI on multiple OSes that doesn’t suck. First class and best in class TypeScript support. It’s going to be hard to beat, now or five years from now.

My only problem with it is performance when you load large repos and occasionally large files because it is an Electron app eventually. I know the extension ecosystem has thrived just because it is Electron but I wish MS worked on a native editor to achieve it.

It has the rendering engine of a browser and that also has some advantages in rendering capabilities. Browsers are really good at rendering rich text, it's what they were designed for, and a native editor can't beat that.

There's the occasional big text file that I have to open, in which case Vim would do a better job. But usually VS Code has no performance issues for me.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#49

Post by sdevonoes » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 8:10 PM UTC

I want to like VS Code, but I can't stand the "dynamic" left side bar. It's used as an "explorer", it's used to handle "extensions" and it's used for search. I want a fixed left sidebar (fixed as an "explorer"). Is this something configurable?

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#50

Post by alexmcc81 » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 8:11 PM UTC

laksdjfkasljdf wrote: post #15

VS Code, the text editor, is a trojan horse. Microsoft is selling you into the IDE, in small portions. This is similar to the IBM approach with JAVA last decade(s?). You install a "text editor" for simple things, like code completion. Before you realize you don't even know which compiler you are using or where it came from. You just press F5 and look at convenient break points. And somehow it only runs right on Azure…

You're right - it is a trojan horse and people are eating up the 'MS heart Open Source' PR. It's obvious when you look at what they're doing with language servers.

They've replaced the open source Python language server with a closed source one. The C/C++ was always closed. Their remote feature and collaboration tools are also closed. They're slowly making people depend on MS services without even realising it.

They want you to run your development environment on Azure and are making it possible piece by piece, turning your IDE into a thin client. And they're open about that aim but still call VS Code "open source". It is not - it has open source components and lots of telemetry so MS can develop those services. If people are happy with that, so be it but the 'love' they get is undeserved.