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The Era of Visual Studio Code

blog.robenkleene.com

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Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#441

Post by cookiengineer »

nitemice wrote: post #404
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…

As someone who uses all three of the editors you named, I think that each serves a pretty different purpose in practice. Each aspires to be the be-all, end-all editor/IDE, but that's just unrealistic to me. For me, I use VIM all day, every day at work (C++), because while it doesn't have the full IDE experience out of the box, it's close enough, and can be brought much closer with various plugins and knowledgeable ad…

Your description pretty much sums it up for me.

I use vim primarily for around 9 years now, and with ALE as a linter plugin it's integrated with languages I even don't know existed until I need to fix something in it in a foreign codebase.

If I need to go typescript or web, vscode is very tightly integrated with the build toolchains, so the occasional fix in vscode is necessary for me when I need to fix a bug upstream.

I tried migrating to neovim a lot of times, but their syntax highlighting is always so damn broken even with a plain vimrc that I stopped bothering anymore.

Currently, I'm trying to migrate to kakoune because I've heard a lot of nice things, and the ecosystem seems to be better integrated with lsp and rust, but honestly my muscle memory is damn strong, so it's actually kind of a burden at the moment and I'm gonna need a while if I keep pursuing this.

One benefit though that both emacs and vim have is ssh usage. Debugging and reading logs on a remote server is pain sometimes, and my vim profile eases that sooo much up that I saved a shitload of time by using it.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#442

Post by johnghanks »

macinjosh wrote: post #156

If you want a text editor with longevity try vim or emacs. They aren't dependent on the benevolence of a greedy corporation. Over time VSCode _will_ be raided by the bean counters at MS and it will begin to track you, give you ads about MS products, and lock you in to their ecosystem. I'll never understand why a professional developer would give so much influence over their work to the likes of MS, JetBrains, etc. Su…

[flagged]

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#443

Post by sedatk »

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…

Yes it’s subpar compared to Visual Studio as a .NET IDE, but that’s probably one of the reasons .NET hasn’t been prioritized yet: There is Visual Studio.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#444

Post by TeMPOraL »

ramraj07 wrote: post #240
bitwize wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between VSCode and Emacs is the difference between an extensible text editor, and an editor that was designed to be extended, molded, and shaped as you work. At any time within Emacs, you can evaluate Lisp code to extend or modify its functionality. What's more, the always-on presence of Lisp turns Emacs into a computing environment with strong editing primitives, rather than a text editor with stuff b…

Question: how do you become most efficient in writing python? Your answer: Learn Lisp! Technically true even in spite of emacs, but if every engineer out there learns lisp to write better python wouldn't that be an interesting world.

Why? A good Lisp will give you a decent ride around the block. Even without reaching code-data-equivalence enlightment, it's a fast way to round your knowledge of various paradigms and approaches.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#445

Post by square_usual »

barkingcat wrote: post #120
jyriand wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does VSCode have something similar to emacs’s spacemacs, doom or prelude?

are you asking if anyone implemented the 3d first person shooter DOOM inside of the vscode plugin system? that could be a summer of code project for some aspiring coder.

No, DOOM Emacs is like a variant of Emacs: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#446

Post by mdekkers »

scarface74 wrote: post #254
jameslk wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to use Intellij for everything (and I'm not even a Java dev). It is indeed very nice and comes with so much out-of-box around languages and popular libraries. However, Intellij is _sooo_ very slow to load and edit with. This is more tolerable if you work on one project. But in the past couple years, I've had to work on many smaller projects, and loading up Intellij for multiple projects meant gigs of RAM disap…

IntelliJ still has that Java GUI stench that made me stay away from Java over 15 years ago.

There are some pretty good theme options. Have a look at the material theme for example https://www.material-theme.com

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#447

Post by l8again »

My workflow of the last 10 years when choosing editors:

Browse directories/read files/quick retrieval? -> Vim

Make a quick edit on anything and rerun compiler/test/docker run -> Vim

Write any kind of quick bash/python script -> Vim

Code read a project or work on a feature -> Fire up an IDE (IntelliJ mostly, or Webstorm if javascript)

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#448

Post by moonchild »

spullara wrote: post #373
btown wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see them as complementary. VS Code shines if you’re jumping between independent codebases for distinct projects, and startup time matters. But my startup monorepo I keep loaded in IntelliJ for days at a time and have never looked back. For the 1% of time it’s laggy due to a JVM GC or background indexing, the other 99% of the time it’s immensely productive to have e.g. full-stack debug breakpoints that Just Work, we…

I wonder if ZGC in Java 15, now that it is GA, would clean up any lag folks see.

Personally, my experience with jetbrains IDEs is not that they lagged, but simply that they were slow.

ZGC would probably harm more than help.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#449

Post by mdekkers »

derefr wrote: post #238
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…

Fancy IDEs are lubricants for high-friction languages. If a language is already low-friction, there won't be much benefit to be gained from an IDE, as even a plain text editor will already get you near to optimal productivity in said language. Personally, I'd rather use a plain-old "code editor" (with at most syntax highlighting, but no snippets, let alone autocomplete), in part because doing so will actively steer m…

> Imagine if there was a hammer that was so badly-balanced that—despite being not too hard to lift—you needed to be wearing a powered exoskeleton to accurately hold and swing it.

Ah, like a jackhammer? One of those huge ones attached to a digger they use to break open the roads?

It’s a right-tool-for-the-job kind of thing. Some roads can be mended with a shovel. Some need a jackhammer.

If you limit your development to “what a human being can hold in their head” you are artificially limiting yourself. The whole reason we use higher level languages is so that the machine can exceed what a human can hold in their head.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#450

Post by bigtunacan »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #395
renewiltord wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I think you're right about performance being a problem, but I have 64 GiB and a 4790k and an NVMe SSD. It's like half a percentage of my pre-tax income and was even less when I bought it. I don't need efficiency. I need something that, given fuel, gives me power. And as someone who has donated to vim, was an early backer of neovim's bountysource, and loves his terminal: vim is my ion drive, IntelliJ and friends…

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…

I've been a JetBrains user for about a decade now (intelliJ/RubyMine/PHPStorm) and for general editing you really don't notice the performance issues at first. But if you leave it running long enough or you make use of features that lean heavily on indexing like code inspections on large codebases or language level inspections as a couple of examples it will chew through memory like crazy and drag a machine down that's newer and higher spec'ed than you've listed.

That said, given everything it provides I don't think there is a better tool for the job despite the performance issues.

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