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Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

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Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Windows, comparing different Jetbrains products to VS Code, I personally experience for example a constant input lag in the terminal (Powershell) emulator (?) on Jetbrains IDEs.

IntelliJ user here. Both on Windows (personal) and Mac OS (work). I never understood why people use the terminals built into their IDE. Can you explain the use case for this? Genuine question. I do certain stuff via the command line and other stuff via the IDE. But switching between windows and just using the native tool for its own job seems the most natural to me. Is there some sort of awesome integration or someth…

One reason is to be able to full screen the IDE and use its built-in windowing/paneling for editing and terminal.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#293
post #30

I used to think VS Code was going to be a threat to JetBrains IDEs considering how fast its iterative development was (thanks in large part to the productivity of JS + Web renderer) but its never seems to quite be able to reach the feature-set, polish & intelligence of JetBrains IDEs. Every IDE function appears to be better implemented in JetBrains, whether it's Code Analysis, Refactoring, Navigation, Running/Debuggi…

in my experience Intellij looks better if you have coded in Inttellij first (especially Java) and then moved to othet tools. Intellij offers a lot of custom behaviours that IMO programmers start coding the "Intellij way" (let's call it Intellij muscle memory for lack of a better definition) on the other hand going from vi to Emacs to Sublime to VSCode is less of a problem and people tend to honestly judge strength an…

I had the exact same feeling arriving into projects using PyCharm: somehow I could feel PyCharm's influence over the code and ignorance of the non-IDEA tools (e.g. makefile/isort/black, which are usually superior/easier to use than the mouse oriented interface of PyCharm). I even use a phrase for the way they are developed: PyCharm oriented development.

VSCode is better at first, unless you need to work with Python 2.7, where it fails completely: there is no good lsp for it (intellisense fails), and working this problem around by downgrading to ctags does not work either.

The best I can say about them is that both has decent multi cursor implementation.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#294
post #30

I used to think VS Code was going to be a threat to JetBrains IDEs considering how fast its iterative development was (thanks in large part to the productivity of JS + Web renderer) but its never seems to quite be able to reach the feature-set, polish & intelligence of JetBrains IDEs. Every IDE function appears to be better implemented in JetBrains, whether it's Code Analysis, Refactoring, Navigation, Running/Debuggi…

VS Code is also pretty nice for free. I wouldn’t use it professionally if I had Idea. But for home use, free is pretty ok.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#295

My take with VS Code is that their support of development container and ssh is the best and it's a killer feature. My ultimate goal for quite sometime now was to pack all my development dependencies inside containers or cloud-init files to keep my host bare-bone and have reproducible/shareable setups anywhere anytime. Before I was an Emacs fan. I tried multiple combination of Emacs, Tramp and containers but it failed…

I desperately wanted VS Code's remote development functionality in IDEA, and was keeping track of their remote development feature in YouTrack. When CodeWithMe was released, I was sorely disappointed. All I wanted was my code to run anywhere, and my local machine to be the IDE. mutagen.io ended up being my answer. After learning how it worked, I got it set up and it works really well. I'm mostly doing PHP development…

Jetbrains Projector seems to be their solution. It runs the IDE on the server, and renders the GUI in a browser. Seems experimental so far, I'm running it at home and it's surprisingly far along but still ... Kludgey? A great POC.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#296
I have no doubt that IDEA is probably more "professional" but I find VS Code is more my preference because of the open source nature of it. I know it has it's warts but it's in a whole different league than IDEA products. However to each his own, I have made a living with open source and that has colored my perceptions of products.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#297
I've used both extensively, and for me it boils down to whether I am using Typescript or not, as the code hints for Typescript are much better in VS Code. I've also noticed VS Code suffers less performance degradation with some projects.

In general, for Java and Python, Intellij is much more polished and functional.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#298
I mostly write JavaScript/TypeScript (with a little Go in my freetime) and I switched from Webstorm to VSCode in December. Things I miss from Webstorm/Intellij:

- Test runner

- visual diff tool (gitlens isn't quite good enough)

I've been thinking about what I'd miss from VSCode if I switched back and I cant' really come up with anything other than I really love https://shadesofpurple.pro/.

So why did I switch? Basically everybody is using VSCode on screencasts, at work, etc. for TypeScript and JavaScript and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. It's not better, and I don't really understand why it's popularity.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#299
I almost use always vscode via it's ssh remote development feature. In my experience this thing is flawless and indistinguishable from local development. It's hardly believable how good they've made it.

The idea vs. code is something i don't buy. Each has its use cases. Idea has great tools for android development, it's just tightly geared towards that, which is especially good for someone that is not a main android developer and need to those extra wheels. While vscode is my go to editor for everything else, including java ee.

Re: Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code

#300
> Meanwhile, JetBrains seems to be staying afloat mostly thanks to hard work and sheer luck.

I don't think they keep ahead simply by hard work and sheer luck. Once you look under the hood at Intellij it's clear that they have significant architectural advantages.

While VS Code is a text editor that uses LSPs to provide refactoring and navigation, Intellij is a refactoring engine with a good text editor on the front. Under the hood Intellij is a structured editor operating on abstract syntax trees. ("psi nodes" in Jetbrain's parlance.)

The hard part of creating an LSP is providing things like refactoring and navigation support, and these are exactly the things that IntelliJ provides for its language plugins. To achieve a given level of refactoring and navigation support an LSP developer needs to expend significantly more effort than a jetbrains plugin developer.

From my vantage point Jetbains doesn't seem to be staying ahead by hard work and luck as much as by an intelligent architecture and design that allows them to produce high-level, high-value features with less effort.

[ It's worth looking at IntelliJ's plugin SDK. https://plugins.jetbrains.com/docs/intellij/psi.html ]

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