I have not used an IDE since I ditched Turbo Pascal in middle school, but now I am at a place where everyone and their mother uses VS Code and so I’m giving it a shot.
The thing is, I’m finding the “just works” mantra is not true at all. Nothing is working out of the box. And then for each separate extension I have to figure out how to fix it. Or I just give up and circumvent it by using the terminal.
What’s even the point then?
IDK maybe its a matter of getting used to something new, but I was doing fine with just vim and tmux.
I’m currently using VSCodium too, why did you switch? What’s the appeal? Would you recommend them?
I would like to know, too.
Not the OP, but I switched to helix, because I always wanted to learn something vim-like, and helix is just perfect for that. It’s simple, working great without any configuration, and has nice keybindings.
Maybe he’s just a hipster
Not the OP, but I switched to helix, because I always wanted to learn something vim-like, and helix is just perfect for that. It’s simple, working great without any configuration, and has nice keybindings.
Well I guess I can give my opinion as a former VSCode and Vim user that migrated to Helix. @[email protected] was curious too.
Way back when, I used Sublime Text and got proficient with those keyboard shortcuts. Then VSCode eclipsed (pun unintended) Sublime, so I switched and I was thankfully able to keep using Sublime key bindings. I was also productive with VSCode, except it wasn’t popular at the company I was working at, where most people used Vim. I ended up learning a bit of Vim for pair programming, but I still clinged to VSCode, even though it lacked proper support for connecting to a VM via SSH (which was a very common workflow).
At some point I realized that it was important to have a totally keyboard-centric workflow to level up my productivity and ergonomics, and being able to use a mouse in VSCode was hindering my progress. So I tried NeoVim, and it was kind of a nightmare. I know many people enjoy tinkering with Lua to get NeoVim working as they want, but I found it more of a barrier to productivity than anything else.
So then I learned about Helix, and it seemed like a love letter to devs that just want a modal in-terminal editor that works out of the box and has modern features like LSP support, DAP, etc. Also it’s written in Rust by good maintainers. I haven’t looked back, because the Helix + Tmux combo is incredibly versatile.
if you want even more frictionless experience and save a few megs of ram check out wezterm, it does a pretty good job of integrating multiplexing into terminal. also it’s very extensible as it’s configurable with lua.
on a side note, I had some stability issues with vscode-neovim where it’d crash it in worst cases.
I agree, thought Atom was kind of a fun text editor but silly for being an entire Chrome browser, then it mutated into this intentionally held back IDE where not even developing PowerShell or C# can be done without mucking about first.
There is barely any functionality without add-ins but not because they want to keep the base program light. And it siphons all the data it can get, of course.
It’s pretty clear to me that they don’t want it to be better than Visual Studio proper, so you don’t get a sane menu structure or out of the box functionality. Microsoft made an editor that is somehow more opaque and unintuitive than vi, not because of necessity or for practicality reasons but because it has to be different from the flagship product.
I’d much rather work with Spyder, Netbeans or Eclipse. Or some Jetbrains product.
so you don’t get a sane menu structure
Not saying they shouldn’t have a sane structure, but in 6 years of using VS Code I never cared about menus because everything can and should be accessed through the command palette (F1 / Ctrl+Shift+P).
To me complaining about menus in VS Code sounds like complaining of modes and motions in vi / vim. Maybe the editor is not for you.
vi is the way it is for very good reasons, I don’t really see that with VS Code. Even gVim has menus. You can have both accessibility and flexibility/speed.
I would still try to adapt to it, but the PowerShell experience I had a couple months ago put me off it (and VSCodium) for good. Install IDE, install plug-in, hangs forever until you figure out that the useless error message means you need to install some additional .msi from Microsoft. Blergh.
use linux
There are some things about it which are a bit annoying and not easy to initially work out, but overall I’ve found it to do pretty much everything I want, and a few things I didn’t know I wanted until I found out it did them.
everyone and their mother uses VS Code
This is usually a good reason to avoid something. Especially if that something comes from Microsoft.
So things stop being usable as soon as they become mainstream?
Monocultures are bad. Popularity very rarely tracks quality. And once something is overwhelmingly popular, it usually goes to shit, because the momentum is enough to keep it successful.
See: Windows. Outlook. Reddit. CrowdStrike.
But vscode hasn’t gone to shit…
Lots of things have also gotten popular without going to shit either.
Give it time. This is Microsoft we’re talking about. Look at GitHub or Skype.
Sublime Text with plugins. It’s 100% because it’s what I’m used to.
I mostly use VS Code for notes and configuration files. Sometimes Python scripts. I agree with you, it requires a lot of setup. It has replaced Vim for me either way.
Most of my programming is done in IntelliJ, which works mostly out of the box. I’ve also used Visual Studio (not to be confused with VS Code).
I can’t imagine working without a proper IDE for any serious programming anymore. Working without IDE is like self imposed handicap.
lazyvim is enough for me.
I do. I used to juggle between Code::Blocks, PyDev, NetBeans and others, depending on projects. I find VS Code kind of fulfills the promise of Eclipse of being an all-purpose IDE, without the bloat Eclipse became synonymous with. It really clicked for me when I started using devcontainers. I am now a big fan of the whole development containers concept and use it in VS Code daily…
Code::Blocks
This still exists? I played around with it’s portable app eons ago.
development containers
How does that compare to Vagrant?
Code::Blocks is still chugging along, albeit at a glacial pace.
The rise of Docker has made containers very popular in the last 10 years or so. Nowadays you can run a single WSL2 VM on Windows with a Linux distro, and run any number of containers inside it. Vagrant is useful if you need full-fledged VMs for your environments.
I use VS code, mainly for the jupyter notebook integration.
Nope, at work, we use JetBrains IDEs and for my personal stuff, I’m using Kate.
Seeing the hype wave for VS Code was so bizarre, like millions of people discovered features that were just bog standard in IDEs for a long time. Two colleagues tried to sell it to me and the features they chose to do so with, were the commit GUI and the embedded terminal.
My best guess is that if you weren’t a programmer, then you didn’t use an IDE and there just wasn’t many good editors on Windows. Like, Notepad++ has been there since forever, but it doesn’t have that many features. And Sublime has been around for a long time, too, but never made it big.
The thing about VSCode is that it was lightweight and modular with the extensions. At least for me.
Lightweight compared to a full-featured IDE, sure, but it starts a whole bloomin’ web browser to render a text editor. That is not lightweight at all, compared to Notepad++, Sublime, Kate, Vim, Emacs etc…
Sublime was pretty big before Atom. Atom just had absolutely abysmal startup speeds. Using Atom like an IDE was fine because it stayed open but using it like an editor was awful. Code fixed those problems.
The problem with Sublime is that it’s a paid one, and not everybody wants to pay for something that is perceived by the community as something that should be free and open source.
It’s paid like WinRAR is paid.
I don’t think VSCode’s mantra is that it “just works”. It’s definitely a “platform” IDE like Eclipse was.
No, it was far too “fiddly” and I have no problem with the performance of full ides from jetbrains.
Any IDE is going to take some getting used to and some setup. VS Code is easy to get started with but if you really want everything to be optimal, it’s going to take some effort.
The problems you’re facing aren’t very clear. Can you expand a bit?
Lots of things in VS Code just work if you use the non-FOSS version and don’t need to install any system dependencies. For example, there are a ton of code formatters that you can install and run without tuning (eg I installed a SQL formatted last week with nothing else to do). There are also some that you need underlying dependencies for (eg if you want Rust extensions to work, you need the Rust toolchain; same for LaTeX); however this is true in any editor based on my experience (although some editors eg JetBrains might mask that through their GUI). Across both options, you often need to tune your extensions based on your use case or even hardware in some cases (eg setting up nonstandard
PATHitems).YMMV for VSCodium, the FOSS version, primarily because it relies on a different extension registry per the terms of use. You can get around this as a user; as a vendor they cannot. Outside of tweaking the registry I’m not aware of anything else you need to do for parity.
Edit: forgot to tie all this back to my opener. What do you mean when you say it requires all sorts of work? Are you experiencing other issues than something I called out?
VSCode seems to have fun ignoring my “don’t guess encodings and assume this one” on files.
VSCodium respects that setting.
I was doing some Jinja templating in a Flask app the other day and VS Code would not respect my explicit file typing through the GUI over restarts. I had to change my file extensions and install an extension for Jinja syntax highlighting to get that to work.
I feel that pain.
This post reads like going to a Linux forum and asking for issues with the GTX660, which absolutely does not work on Linux: your concerns are legitimate and it’s reasonable not to buy all the good comments on VS Code based on your personal experience. However, it works on my machine. And it also works for many others.
You also mention to have been doing fine with “just vim”. I’d argue that you should face VS Code with the same humility you faced vim. If you’re up to the task, take your time to learn its quirks just like you did with Vim’s. Otherwise, you’re better off ending your career with the toolsuite you know for now.
