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.
Funny to read VSCode described as an IDE.
Where I work, I’m the weird one for preferring VSCode over Visual Sudio or Rider.
I prefer using a terminal to run build tasks and execute tests and do version control, and have mostly Language Server stuff integrated into the editor.
Why would VSCode not be called an IDE?
No, it’s a code editor. It can become an IDE with the right set of plugins.
It’s a modular IDE.
They’re just saying that so that they have a justification for making two IDEs.
What is your definition of an IDE?
I don’t think there’s an exact definition but broadly I would say if it has the majority of these features it’s definitely an IDE:
If you make something with all those then it’s definitely an IDE. Without some of them it’s more debatable. For example the old Arduino editor… I would still say is a very basic IDE even though it doesn’t have a proper debugger - it has other heavily integrated development tools, e.g. the UART viewer.
Nobody loves arguing semantics more than a programmer. VSCode is absolutely an IDE. Jetbrains is entirely plugin based, Eclipse is totally plugin based, and yeah so is VSCode.
🙏 Happy to see this opinion somewhere else. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I see folks adamant that Code-like editors aren’t IDEs while saying other plugin based editors are.