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The Era of Visual Studio Code

blog.robenkleene.com

81–90 of 698 posts

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#81

I pay for a personal subscription to the JetBrains suite, use IntelliJ and PyCharm all day, and have also used Visual Studio all day in the recent past. The combination of modern IDEs with modern hardware is pretty awesome. My use of Emacs fluctuates depending on the job, language, environment, etc. but I've mostly used it for Org mode and a scratch pad since I signed up for JetBrains. That said, I tried Nova from Pa…

I use JetBrains suite as well. If only they could offer ONE IDE that is configurable to be used on many programming languages. Having many different binaries is a pita.

With IDEA I can do Java, Web, SQL, Python, Rust.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#82

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…

I'm legit confused on what you're trying to say. Are you saying tech stacks are a bad thing? Or that corporate investment or connection to a tech stack is a bad thing? What's your proposed solution or alternative?

One thing I _think_ you're saying that I do find important:

It's crucial to have experience in more than one ecosystem and tech stack, as you learn a lot from seeing communities reinvent the wheel and not learn from one another. You get to see common patterns in software development and engineering and, sometimes, you find novel approaches that are completely alien to the engineering ecosystem you started out in.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#83
post #9

VS Code is awesome. If you told me ten years ago my daily driver text editor on Linux would be a Microsoft product, well, you’d have been right. Sane defaults. Snappy interface. Universal UI on multiple OSes that doesn’t suck. First class and best in class TypeScript support. It’s going to be hard to beat, now or five years from now.

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.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#84

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…

There are two aspects of this that I run into:

- Features that should arguably be built in require searching for, evaluating, and installing a plugin.

- Some plugins spam you with a "What's New" page with each update.

Bookmarking is an example of these two in action: https://github.com/alefragnani/vscode-bookmarks/issues/175

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#85

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; my years of experience with Java, Maven, Netbeans, Eclipse (eugh...), and IntelliJ completely evaporated when I did 'npm init' on my current (Node and React) project, which I'm working on in VS Code.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#86

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.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#87

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…

I don't know even other platforms are starting to build plugin integrations into it.

For example, Google Cloud Code which lets you deploy/manage cloud run and k8s from it.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#88
post #59
post #42

For those that like Vim, but also like some of the features that VS Code offers, but do not like VS Code itself and/or its Vim integrations or emulations, I must heartily recommend coc.nvim [0]. It's like using a modern IDE, minus the bloat and anti-features which make most of them (including, of course, VS Code) painful to use. [0] - https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim

ALE [0] is also nice if you just want a lightweight way to add linting / formatting / name lookups / autocompletion without a lot of extras. It uses LSP for everything, and can apparently be used together with coc, although I'm not sure why you'd want both. [0] https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale

[deleted]

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#89

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…

I didn't realize they replaced the Python language server with a proprietary one, that's too bad. https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/issues/4 has some brief discussion before it was closed.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#90
post #60
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VS 2019 without ReSharper does not feel bloated at all.

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.
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