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The Era of Visual Studio Code

blog.robenkleene.com

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Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#91

Post by barkingcat »

andrewstuart wrote: post #21

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 Plugins can be duplicated, outdated, abandoned and incompatible.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…

You don't need all the plugins. You just need a curated set. And some of the plugins are fantastically high quality.

The Microsoft Python one is excellent, as is the Remote development one.

I'm a fan of VS Code because in spite of it having a plug in system, there are great plug ins there. And that one single great plugin is all that is needed (for that specific purpose)

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#92

Post by Kranar »

lloeki wrote: post #74
Kranar wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, just like Visual Studio Code exists for macOS and Linux. My specific argument was Microsoft is unlikely to release a proprietary IDE for macOS or Linux. Visual Studio for macOS is free and Microsoft open sourced Xamarin and Monodevelop [1] when they acquired it back in 2016.

[1] https://github.com/mono/monodevelop

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#93

Post by stu2b50 »

qppo wrote: post #67

There's a couple big knocks against VS Code that don't get brought up enough The extension API is underdocumented. It's very difficult and time consuming to onboard yourself as an extension author with just the MS docs, since they don't cover the entire API and the vast majority of data structures are undocumented entirely. This is really annoying when functions take structures as arguments and have optional fields.…

>Not overall performance/memory so much as startup time

Is this actually a problem, though? I typically use VSCode as a "focused" text editor; it's for working on a codebase for a long period of time (relatively speaking). A minute or do startup amortized over hours of work is not much of a bother really.

For quick edits, vim is still my go to. Different tools for different needs.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#94

Post by nahtnam »

sdevonoes wrote: post #49

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?

You can try the following: 1. Open the explorer tab on the left 2. Drag every other item on the left bar into the explorer menu. This adds a little menu at the bottom 3. Collapse each of the menus at the bottom and never open them again

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#95

Post by i_dursun »

IshKebab wrote: post #61
colordrops wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not at all. You can open a directory, or a workspace. A workspace is just a collection of directories. If you want a confusing workspace/project system try Eclipse!

Actually, the designer of Eclipse’s and VS Code’s extension system is the same person: Eric Gamma from Gang of four.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#96

Post by mas3god »

switch007 wrote: post #57

The UI is an absolute mess. "Check for updates" immediately shows "Downloading updates". That's not what I expected. How about some confirmation? Start a .NET project and you see "Downloading package 'OmniSharp for OSX' (49713 KB)", "Downloading package 'Razor Language Server (macOS / x64)' (51227 KB)". No prompt. Just starts downloading 100MB of deps. For some reason the Output tab down the bottom has 20 options in…

Compared to jet brains though? Id argue its a huge improvement.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#97

Post by highpost »

The author is right about VS Code becoming the incumbent solution for text editors ... but for the wrong reasons. As he demonstrates, extensions have largely completed their evolutionary cycle with VS Code playing a heroic role in the final act. And he is also right about the benefits of having of a Very Large Corporation collaborating with the open source community.

But instead of asking yourself what will be your daily driver in 10-15 years, ask what you would recommend to a highschool student today? Hint: it won't be EMACS.

For me what makes VS Code sing is its vision of collaboration:

* Git is a first-class citizen.

* Live Share provides real collaboration for distributed workers where you can authenticate with someone else through your GitHub accounts. That sounds pretty good for the COVID era but it will become the norm for remote development. The documentation even has a HOWTO for running a technical interview! https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/liveshare/use/...

Having said that, the Live Share authentication procedure needs some serious sandpapering of its rough edges! And I would really like to see other authentication providers for Live Share beyond GitHub and Microsoft accounts.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#98

Post by stefan_ »

frankjr wrote: post #52

I completely switched to VS Code once I discovered the remote development feature [0]. It allows you to run VS Code locally but work on a project in a different environment (via SSH, Docker, WSL). The integration is seamless - search, debugger, terminal, extensions - everything looks and behaves as if it was running locally but is delegated to the configured remote. You can even have different remotes opened at the s…

This is such a hugely undervalued feature, and no other editors seem to provide anything remotely close. I found it particularly useful for the COVID work from home - I yeeted my work laptop into a corner and just SSH into it to continue working with the ergonomics of my home desktop machine.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#99

Post by leetrout »

gruez wrote: post #86
andrewstuart wrote: post #21

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'm not a fan of VS Code because everything is a plugin. Replace "vs code" with "javascript" and "plugin" with "library" and you've just described the javascript ecosystem.

Yes. And Gatsby has taken it to the extreme.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#100

Post by gruez »

Analemma_ wrote: post #90
Clubber wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Mac version of VS is not actually VS at all, it's rebranded Xamarin Studio. I assume the GP was talking exclusively about "actual" VS when he says it's much better now, which I also agree with.

He mentioned "in a VM", so I'm guessing he's running the actual visual studio on a windows VM (guest OS), in his mac (host OS).
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