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The Era of Visual Studio Code

blog.robenkleene.com

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Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#141

Post by jakear »

dividedbyzero wrote: post #64

I use VS Code every day and it's a great platform, but to claim it's the endgame of editors is one big hyperbole. It's a very opinionated piece of software that serves lots of popular niches well right now, but I haven't yet been able to find a mix of extensions that makes it a viable replacement for IntelliJ for Scala, to name one example. I'd expect the next uber popular editor to be optimized towards completely di…

> It's really hard to be effective in any IDE without memorizing dozens of keyboard shortcuts,

Curious if you use the command palette much? It should be a decent replacement for route memorization of keyboard shortcuts: How do I format this document agian? Hm... F1;form;enter done. And git push? F1:gpu;enter. Etc.

I work on vs code and am trying to improve this area so all feedback appreciated!

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#143

Post by TeMPOraL »

alexmcc81 wrote: post #50
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…

> And they're open about that aim but still call VS Code "open source".

Yeah, it's a principle worth remembering: "open source" doesn't mean anything if most of the software only runs on someone else's cloud without you having any control or visibility into it.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#144

Post by qppo »

stu2b50 wrote: post #93
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.

Yes, because of how VS Code has evolved we're not using it for quick edits but as a front end to entire systems. If I need to check something quick in a remote session that is configured through some extension in VS Code without simple terminal access and for one reason or another I haven't left it idling all day, those times will hurt my productivity.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#145

Post by mjayhn »

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 think there's a plugin for it but workspaces would be much more valuable to me if they weren't a file you saved. The idea, I assume, is something like "these 10 repos with these 15 plugins are how I deploy this project."

In the end due to its UX I think it's pretty useless. I do use it on BIG projects because sometimes vscode will update or barf and forget what I had open.

I mostly just do "open folders in workspace" then hope it never goes away.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#146

Post by orange8 »

nickjj wrote: post #139

The thing that bugs me about VSCode is it's labeled as open source but a lot of pretty critical and interesting components are closed source so you have no idea what's going on under the hood. Normally that's not too big of a deal (I use plenty of closed source apps), but when it's Microsoft it's hard to trust what they are doing with that data. That and I feel that this promotes vendor lock-in at multiple levels. Ov…

What are some of all these pretty critical and interesting components you mention?

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#147

Post by voxl »

yepthatsreality wrote: post #118

VS Code is nice for green developers, however I always encourage finding a different editor. This helps encourage exploration, customization, and configuration. You will need to take the training wheels off sometime in your career. Another reason to prefer other editors is they tend to stay out of your way. VS Code tries really hard to make you not even leave the window. Anecdotally, a previous colleague once sold me…

Editor and tooling has been flame bait since vim and emacs and you're just stoking the flames.

The idea that VS Code is for "green" development only is flatly false, I've used it to work on and debug GCC, hardly green.

The idea you should always be looking for new tooling is also false. If you're a power user of emacs then enjoy it. Consider it your super power, I'm not interested in taking that from you.

VS Code is, in my opinion, thee editor for several languages. The package support is it's real killer feature and the fact that it hits a decent compromise on performance between Sublime and Atom. Atoms packaging is arguably better and more flexible but it leads to bad package performance. Sublimes packaging was annoying when I used it in the past, no better then the train wreck that is MELPA of emacs. Again, all of that being my personal opinion.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#148

Post by orange8 »

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 absolutely do use VS Code - it's always loaded, but I only use it like a simple text editor.

Then you do not really need to install any plugins. Problem solved!

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#149

Post by jimbokun »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #76
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…

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.

It seems like Emacs shares the same product philosophy of VS Code. Outside of the core functionality everything is an ELisp/Javascript plugin.

That explains Emacs amazing longevity, but as the article points out, Emacs longevity is actually a problem as its keyboard and UI conventions predate the modern conventions that came with Windows and MacOS.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#150

Post by diydsp »

ldiracdelta wrote: post #75
oceanghost wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes it seems to be different everytime I use it. But the one time that the debugger worked was amazing. Wish I could make it happen again.
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