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.
Idk where you got the “just works” idea from, but maybe you’re looking for something more like the jetbrains IDEs?
I still use the terminal all the time with VSC.
Yeah, I guess the idea of VSCode isn’t to be a “ready to use” IDE, but to be configurable — which it is.
The main thing that makes it popular nowadays is the ecosystem of plugins around it. Ex: when Copilot was released, I believe the VSCode plugin was the best one.
Also many frameworks docs have instructions on how to use it with VSCode and which plugins to install, such as some web frameworks and Flutter.
On top of being super bloated, Intellij’s Rider is far from “just working” in my experience. Not only is it super slow to boot, but it also changes asmdefs in my Unity project unprompted, in a way that prevents my project from working (creates cyclic dependencies). The debugger also sometimes doesn’t trigger breakpoints 😵💫
I absolutely despise it, viscerally.
I don’t think VSCode’s mantra is that it “just works”. It’s definitely a “platform” IDE like Eclipse was.
Vs codium, which is based on vscode but spyware is stripped out
Since no one told me this, I will trek people:
If you go for codium, be warned that one of the big points of vs code, extensions, gets a lot more of a hassle.
One of the things you lose is access to Microsofts extension store, and they’ve added their own instead, and that one is missing a lot.
If you want extensions from the Microsoft store, you need to download them manually from the website, and keep them updated manually.
This includes the Python extension, so no Python for you (or at least no Pylance ;_;)
VSCodium > VSCode
What do you mean fix it? I haven’t had an issue with vscode or extensions unless I was going against established patterns.
For an actual recommendation, if you were fine with tmux and vim rock em yo. Don’t forget vim has panes as well.
Platformio maybe?
That thing just sometimes won’t work on some PCBs unless you explicitly specify a build option (I had it once that I had to specify a build option that was already specified in that board configuration)
Installing pycom stuff too. All of their software is crap (hardware isn’t amazing either) so their released version simply didn’t work by default on a fresh installation and the fix was to roll back to the previous version manually.
I’ve not had any of these issues with VSCode and i do use it just for the seamless Remote Development over SSH abilities.
The learning curve for it is a lot less than Vim even if Vim is likely a much more powerful tool imo
VSCode isn’t an IDE, although you can kinda make it work like an IDE with extensions.
I use Visual Studio Professional as my IDE at work, but we do a lot of C#.
With these modern extensible text editors the line between IDE and editor is too blurry to really tell. Many things people would agree are IDEs (like Eclipse) are entirely based around a plugin architecture too. I don’t think it’s worth it to split hairs over whether Visual Studio Code and similar programs are or aren’t IDEs. With enough plugins, they’re IDEs. With too few, they aren’t. Where that line is is entirely subjective.
You also run into different sets of tools that define an IDE. And especially with language server protocols giving almost any text editor access to the only things that were ever strictly the domain of IDEs, I think it’s safe to say we live in a golden age of being able to write things with as much or as little assistance as you want
Like (Neo)vim, it’s a PDE: Personalized Development Environment
Props to TJ DeVries for coming up with that term.
VS Code is a great text editor for me. I write Markdown documents, manipulate bulk strings, and diff files with it. Aside from small scratch projects, its consistency and reliability as an IDE is varied for me. It’s far from “just works”, at least for the types of things I do (C, C++, C#, Rust) and isn’t really on my list of editors I’d recommend for those workloads.
You can make it work, but it’s going to require extensive time spent figuring out what extensions to use (and their quirks), ensure that you have a working setup to the language server, and learn how each environment wants you to setup its tasks and launch configurations, if applicable. Unlike larger IDEs like VS or Rider, it doesn’t have a consistent “new project” process either, so you’re on your own for that.
I wonder what troubles you had with rust in vscode. In my experience. I just install the rust-analyzer extension and it works every time.
Plus some (optional) extension to display the available dependency versions in the Cargo.toml.
Maybe debugging can be a bit tricky, but other than that it’s just installing 1 (or 2) extensions.
It’s exactly that: the trickiness around debugging is the main thing that feels like it’s got some barriers compared to a turnkey solution in an IDE. I heard VS Code and Godot was available until I realized that the LSP and debugger for Godot 4.x was unusable for months until the recent refactor.
Don’t get me wrong though, I am totally using VS Code for my Rust projects. It just isn’t a turnkey solution that I’d recommend to someone if they just want to hit “New project” and do the whole write-compile-debug loop without needing to understand anything. (I had also used it a while back prior to rust-analyzer being the main go-to extension, I think…)
I mostly use VS Code as a simple text editor with some of the CSV plugins. Though with JetBrains coming out with Fleet I’ve started to use that more. It doesn’t have plugin support yet so it’s not getting a lot of use.
For everything else I use whatever JetBrains IDE fits. For work, it’s mostly IntelliJ, DataGrip, PyCharm, and DataSpell. At home, it’s IntelliJ DataGrip and CLion. I guess I’ve kinda drank the JetBrains KookAid, but to me, it’s worth the subscription to the all products pack. Especially if you are a polyglot since you keep a consistent IDE experience.
As @[email protected] says VS Code is ok for simpe text stuff but I prefer Goland and PyCharm for development. As a Child of TP6 I miss the simplicity of the IDE and the color scheme :)
I’m currently using VSCodium too, why did you switch? What’s the appeal? Would you recommend them?
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.
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.
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.
If you’re already doing vim an tmux then vscode is not be worth it. The main draw of VSCode is LSP but you can get that from either COC or nvim+lspconfig. Those will still take more effort than vscode but it’ll be more familiar.
I do Rust and Go and VSCode has been fine for both so far. I put off trying it for ages out of a hatred/distrust of MS products, but I’m quite happy with it.
Just to add my two pennies (that’s a saying, right?), I do use VS code as my default text editor. Professionally and for other projects in C++/C# I use the full fat visual studio. But for scripting, config editing, hex files, todo lists and such I use Code.
I’ve never been much of a person who needs to shave off every possible second in my workflow with macros and plugins, my brain is just not fast enough to out pace my hands, and the command palette does pretty much all I could wish for.
I of course wish it was fully open source, but for being the only Microsoft product I daily it isn’t too bad.
I of course wish it was fully open source
Allow me to introduce you to Codium
Last time I checked codium out it couldn’t support the vs code marketplace/plugin repo. Is this still the case? I should take another look at it either way though :)
Edit: I answered my own question by reading some more comments. So looks like there are alternative plugin registries. I’ll definitely have a go at switching now.
Just to add my two pennies
It’s to add my two penis, if you are a snake and a male.
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.
I switched to Zed recently. Very basic and definitely is not as feature rich as VSCodium but I’m sure it’ll get better.
Zed looks very promising. There are only 2 things that prevent me from using it.
- The git lens vs code extension
- Rust-analyzer configuration
I’ll keep an eye on zed, but I think most people will stay on VSCode until zed gets feature-rich enough that they won’t miss VSCode.
I understand you. Zed does give me some headaches sometimes but I mean it’s still pretty alpha. Maybe I’ll switch back to vscodium until zed becomes more mature after all. Though they never said it was an IDE so I don’t expect for it to be ever feature rich as vscodium.
nothing is working out of the box
I mean, it cannot fly you to the moon, but depends on what you’re expecting.
If nothing works, did you install it via the manual?
