The Era of Visual Studio Code • Hacker News Board

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#431

Post by 013a » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 4:45 AM UTC

In my experience: If you're developing anything outside of JS/TS/Web/Python, the experience in VSCode ranges from ok to totally broken. Which reflects the quality of the plugin ecosystem.

Can plugins really approach the productivity of a more specialized IDE like what JetBrains offers? I haven't seen any evidence that they can, but I'm open minded. The most powerful language support I've seen in VSCode is absolutely TypeScript, and its very good... but is it a plugin? Its not listed in my plugins, it "just works" upon a clean install. Do the Go, Rust, etc plugins just need another four years of work, or will they never approach the quality of TS in VSCode because TS is "built-in"?

And, to be frank, TS is only "very good". Its not "great" when compared to the support, for example, IntelliJ has for Java or VS has for C# when measuring things like the reliability and latency of intellisense and compiler feedback. Which, in my mind, represent the two most important things a code editor should do perfectly. When I have the question "wait, what's that io/ioutil function for reading the content of a file" in VSCode, I literally don't even consider typing "ioutil." and scrolling through the six functions in that package to get the answer, because I know before even trying that VSCode has a 20% chance of helping me. And that's a shame: Because this is by far the fastest way to get this answer; if it worked.

That's not even considering "latency from when I press a key to seeing the action on screen". VS Code is... fine. But my god its startling how much better Sublime is. It feels like spending an hour running on slightly damp soil, then suddenly finding a stretch of paved concrete. But, it lacks in the other productivity features I listed above, and I do think those are more important to get right, for the sole sake of productivity.

I mean, in short, if the next decade is VS Code As King, then it will be a sad decade. I don't trust that VS Code can solve these major issues it has had for four years. Code editors represent a top 3 item in the domain of developer productivity, and there's so much more work we need to do to get them right. We aren't there. And we'll probably never get there if we go all-in on VS Code. I'm so happy to see Panic try something different with their new Nova editor, and I hope we continue to see innovation in this space; not a VS Code monoculture.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#432

Post by scruple » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 4:46 AM UTC

macinjosh wrote: post #400

cutler wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like you have to give up Vim anyway considering the good-enough VSVim plugin gives you most of the Vim basics. Personally I have found JetBrains' Vim plugin to be the best.

If you use vim to its utmost a plugin that emulates vim in another editor pales in comparison. It is like learning to play an instrument. Some people stop digging into it when they learn to play a few tunes but the true beauty comes out when you really invest the time into it.

I used VsVim for a number of years and felt the same way. Eventually, I was back in vim full-time (moved on from the projects/team that required Visual Studio). I've spent the last year migrating to neovim. I've spent the last month getting into some C# development and the VS Code neovim integration is very well done. It's not the same, and I will not be switching to VS Code for anything other than this C# work (for the foreseeable future, I just really like neovim...), but it's not an emulation layer (with this plugin the VS Code editor is a neovim instance in the backend) and it doesn't feel like one, either.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#433

Post by orange8 » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 4:49 AM UTC

gruez wrote: post #328

orange8 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the very definition of a programming language eco-system? Or is the point you are making being you do not like eco-systems?

As opposed to something like python, which is "batteries included".

There you go: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Batteries included! All you ever need to work with JS.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#434

Post by AlfeG » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 4:50 AM UTC

enlyth wrote: post #83

kushalpandya wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People like to bash VS code performance, but try opening a 60MB JSON file in different editors on Windows for example. Notepad doesn't even load and crashes, Sublime will takes minutes to even load the file, Notepad++ will be unusable as scrolling will take a few seconds, and in VS Code it opens immediately and you can seamlessly scroll to any one of the 600k lines without any delay.

With some reasonable delay VSCode will even manage format and highlight this 60mb json. Search will work instantly.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#435

Post by rbosinger » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 4:54 AM UTC

VSCode is pretty amazing but at the rate things are moving I can't imagine betting on anything being defacto for "decades". It's possible, and I even hope so, but with this kind of stuff I also always assume that a shift in perception in our industry can change overnight. Also, products themselves seem to go from "perfect" to "how did this become a joke" so quickly sometimes it's baffling. That all being said, VSCode is impressive and I applaud Microsoft. I still use Vim, but keep eyeing up VSCode.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#436

Post by vladvasiliu » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 4:57 AM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #421

vladvasiliu wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how performance is a problem for Intellij. Granted, I've only ever used Pycharm but I've never felt it sluggish or "slow" or got the impression I was waiting around for the IDE to do its thing . All this on a 2013 MBP with 16GB of RAM. I've found it also works very well on Linux on a laptop with a i5-8250U and 16 GB of RAM. The only thing that seems "slow" is starting up and indexing libraries and whatno…

IntelliJ performs poorly if you have a many-module project with multiple independent `pom.xml` or gradle files on that Mac config you described. It does require tuning in this scenario to ensure that its Maven and Gradle imports do not fail and leave you unable to resolve your types. If you have a generate-source step you're going to be in even more trouble.

Would VSCode work better in this scenario? I'm not familiar with Java tooling, so my question is whether this is a tooling problem or an IntelliJ problem.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#437

Post by hliyan » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 4:57 AM UTC

tjpnz wrote: post #398

willbw wrote: post #198

I find this post along with the comments in "A Picture of Java in 2020" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24551390 to be incongruous with my experience as a professional developer. My first couple of years writing software I used Vim, then VSCode, then worked in a Java shop and was forced to use IntelliJ. I didn't like it at first, but now after a couple of years I cannot see how I lived without it. The idea that…

People have written the same hype driven articles about Sublime, Atom and even IntelliJ. The same articles will continue to be written for whatever comes next. Just use whatever you feel makes you most productive. Having tried VSCode I ended up sticking with PyCharm/Goland.

Before all this, almost twenty years ago, there was JPad Pro another editor that I felt as close to as I feel about VSCode now. It didn't have plugins per se, but you could very easily script new behaviors into it. After that, there was a period of vi usage, before I adopted Sublime. The lesson for me is that VSCode too, will be superseded by something different.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#438

Post by shaklee3 » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 4:57 AM UTC

bsder wrote: post #278

xxpor wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who used tramp and switched to VS Code, it's absolutely not the same thing. The difference is plugins work on the remote side of the connection without having to be aware they're in a remote connection. VS Code makes this work by having an agent running on the remote host. For the first time I actually got autocomplete and code jumping working without a horrendous amount of effort.

> The difference is plugins work on the remote side of the connection without having to be aware they're in a remote connection. This is cool when the machine you are connecting to is more powerful than the one you are sitting on. This is far less cool when the machine you are connecting too is less powerful than your desktop (RPi or Beaglebone, for example).

In that case, why would you try to develop/compile remotely? Just target a different architecture.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#439

Post by hliyan » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 5:00 AM UTC

willbw wrote: post #198

I find this post along with the comments in "A Picture of Java in 2020" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24551390 to be incongruous with my experience as a professional developer. My first couple of years writing software I used Vim, then VSCode, then worked in a Java shop and was forced to use IntelliJ. I didn't like it at first, but now after a couple of years I cannot see how I lived without it. The idea that…

I tend to look at stuttering behavior such as

    Foo foo = new Foo();

as a problem with the language itself. That said, I do agree that writing Java without IntelliJ can be a pain.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#440

Post by luord » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 5:07 AM UTC

no_wizard wrote: post #225

Question I have for everyone who doesn't use an IDE What is your workflow? I find the following to be true, in that one of 3 things happens inevitably: 1. The Text Editor becomes the IDE, (e.g., with VSCode, if you just live in plain HTML, CSS/SCSS/LESS and JSX/TSX/JS/TS all day, its actually pretty great, lots of well maintained extensions and Microsoft really put their energy into capturing into this market with VS…

My answer is in this excellent series I read a while ago: https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/

Which, admittedly, is essentially the same as the other answers you got, but that's how I've been working for three years, since I decided to use vim exclusively.

At the start, I was really tempted to install plugins, but ultimately I decided not to. Both to practice with the terminal (which has been immeasurably beneficial) and to make it as easy as possible to switch computers at the drop of a hat without losing productivity: just install vim and I'm good to go (and often not even that is required since vim comes preinstalled often enough).