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The Era of Visual Studio Code

blog.robenkleene.com

71–80 of 698 posts

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#71
post #60
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VS 2019 without ReSharper does not feel bloated at all.

I'm running VS2019 inside a VM on a Mac and it's horrendous, particularly compile times. It does feel normal on a proper Windows box though.

Exactly this, VS2019 running inside Parallels Desktop is so slow. I’ve tried optimizing to no avail.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#72
Kind of a weird set of text editors in the article. I think the preferred tools depend highly on your language and environment. I'm guessing this is for the JS-frontend specialization mainly. If you did Java, C* etc. then the ubiquitous text editors/IDEs were not these ones.

I have converted to VSCode because it just works and I don't have to mess with PATH or whatever. I run it on Windows, Linux and MacOS and it works the same.

I love that it's extensions-centric because now I can ignore them - instead of the editor bloating into a bigger and slower hairball over the years as devs add new features.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#73
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.

> My only problem with it is performance when you load large repos and occasionally large files because it is an Electron app eventually.

Discovering & pre-loading hundreds of thousands of files is slow on native too. I'm not particularly pleased with how easily folks write off web platform tech as somehow being the source of problems or slowness.

The one complaint that does seem fair is that the memory usage can be high, because there's so much runtime to load. Also, I just keep thinking about your ask here. You want a native editor. But it wouldn't be a native editor. It'd be a native Windows editor, a native Mac editor, a native Android editor, a native iOS editor, a native web editor, a native Gnome, a native KDE editor, &c &c; your preference seems to be that Microsoft have made at least 5 editors. I'm not sure how the plugin system could exist amid such a diverse amount of native runtimes.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#74
post #43

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,…

Visual Studio for macOS (and Linux) exists, it was previously named Xamarin, and before that MonoDevelop.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#75

I'm not a fan of VS Code because everything is a plugin. And plugins are inconsistent, buggy, inconsistently documented, hard to use and find and update and goodness knows who developed them. Plugins can be duplicated, outdated, abandoned and incompatible. But worst of all, a big pile of plugins isn't a consistent integrated product vision. I gave VSCode a solid go, and I had to keep installing plugin after plugin, b…

I have to reinstall PlatformIO every time I use the program. It only takes a second but its absolute madness.

I wanted to replace Arduino IDE so bad, but it kinda works. Certainly compared to the pain I experience on PlatformIO.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#76

I'm not a fan of VS Code because everything is a plugin. And plugins are inconsistent, buggy, inconsistently documented, hard to use and find and update and goodness knows who developed them. Plugins can be duplicated, outdated, abandoned and incompatible. But worst of all, a big pile of plugins isn't a consistent integrated product vision. I gave VSCode a solid go, and I had to keep installing plugin after plugin, b…

Use Emacs - it's a big pile of stuff that's very well integrated, because the platform lends itself to deep interoperability - thanks to a strong conceptual model and extreme reprogrammability. :).

Jokes aside, I guess what VS Code needs is to grow a strong community of people who care about the editor as much as what they do using it. Emacs has managed to do that, so it's possible.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#77

I'm not a fan of VS Code because everything is a plugin. And plugins are inconsistent, buggy, inconsistently documented, hard to use and find and update and goodness knows who developed them. Plugins can be duplicated, outdated, abandoned and incompatible. But worst of all, a big pile of plugins isn't a consistent integrated product vision. I gave VSCode a solid go, and I had to keep installing plugin after plugin, b…

I have to reinstall PlatformIO every time I use the program. It only takes a second but its absolute madness.

It's always worked well for me on Atom, for what it's worth.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#78
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.

For what it is worth, I have never experienced this issue on modern hardware, and I regularly work with a very large monorepo.

Perhaps it is my habit of opening a subset of the repo into the workspace rather than the whole thing (e.g. only the bottom 4 or 5 directory levels so there is at most only a few hundred files in the workspace - builds etc just run from the usual command line so not having the entire repo in the workspace is not an issue for my workflow) but I have been nothing apart from really happy with the performance and have never been found wanting more, apart from loading time but that only happens once or twice a week so I can live with that.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#79
There’s one big difference between a text editor and other example apps (Illustrator and Excel).

Excel is used widely and even with file portability. Microsoft Office is still what many people are used to.

Illustrator, In addition of been being popular. It uses their binary ai file format making it harder to switch from.

TextEditors unlike those 2 does plain text. So there’s at least no file lock-in for plain text.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#80

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…

Indeed, Microsoft Edge for Linux too is a trojan horse. Windows needs to gain leverage against open development platforms. They they need to reach other ecosystems (fedora, centos, mac os). Just like Google when you use their technologies you bet the app is talking to the mothership.
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