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I keep trying VSCode, but the main thing that keeps me going back to Atom is the fact that I have to do everything at the command line or by editing an enormous

I keep trying VSCode, but the main thing that keeps me going back to Atom is the fact that I have to do everything at the command line or by editing an enormous json file. Maybe I'm spoiled, but I'd much rather have a nice UI to deal with settings than have to figure out that, say, in order to show line numbers I have to modify "editor.lineNumbers" and set it to "on" (or is it "true"? or 1? I can't remember... let me go waste more time looking it up...)

mastax 10y ago
While I agree that a real settings menu could be an improvement, they have made the settings experience better. They show a searchable annotated list of all the default settings on the left, and when you type a setting key in on the right it will show suggestions for possible values. Looking at it just now, I also see that they added categories, and little edit buttons when you hover over a setting which allow you to click on what option you want. It's a bit strange to me that they're slowly turning a config file into a settings interface, but I guess it works fine for a Developer-focused product.
- joekrill 10y ago
  Well that's good to know -- in that case I'll give it another shot.
majkinetor 10y ago
This is preciselly the reason I and many of my collegues love it - no GUI for settings. This means you can use hundreeds of tools to manage your settings and it is in true spirit of unix philosophy to keep everything as a text file. Much more time is wasted by looking for options in GUI equivalent and reproducibility, sharing, backup and comparing (diff) are way harder or nonexistent. Creating frontend for it is trivial, but honestly, why drop from horse to donkey as they say. All the apps should have settings like that.
- vvanders 10y ago
  Seriously, Ctrl+Shift+P and start typing gets me to what I need 99% of the time, it's glorious. Combined with the VIM plugin and I rarely need to touch the mouse.
  - majkinetor 10y ago
    I didn't try vim plugin but in general, no vim plugin is substitute for vim.
    - AsyncAwait 10y ago
      If you mostly just want the memorized shortcuts to work, they tend to work OK in VSCode, Atom, IntelliJ and even Emacs - Spacemacs is even a better ViM for some.
      - emidln 10y ago
        As someone who did a fair amount of hacking in vimL, evil-mode is a drastically improved vim. It gets basically everything right, out of the box, and extending it isnt nearly as painful as using vimL or interacting with vim's Python API.
        flukus 10y ago
        > It gets basically everything right, out of the box Custom bindings don't work on the default document. That's a pretty big failure right out of the box. And I still prefer vimL to lisp, it's the php of editor extension languages. It's not great for big plugins but ok great to slap things together quickly.
        Lio 10y ago
        It doesn't, in my experience, get insert mode shortcuts like C-h right out of the box because it clashes with emacs' help mode functionality.
- joekrill 10y ago
titanix2 10y ago
I share your opinion on the settings and command line. While I like it to loads faster than full fledged Visual Studio, in a year or so of using it on Mac OS I still doesn't use even 1% of its features because they are not _discoverable_ at all. Modifying or doing anything beyond text editing require googling. The same apply for using langages extensions beyond syntax coloring. Even Intellisense does not works as expected out of the box so I don't use it.
- AsyncAwait 10y ago
  > still doesn't use even 1% of its features because they are not _discoverable_ at all. There are now categories in the settings file, a search bar and auto-completion, which should make discovery easier. > The same apply for using langages extensions beyond syntax coloring. Do you mean to say that extensions at https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/VSCode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/VSCode are hard for you to discover or that too much of your required functionality is in extensions? > Even Intellisense does not works as expected out of the box so I don't use it. If you have found a bug, it would be great to report it at https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues
rehemiau 10y ago
How often do you change these settings, though? I choose VSCode for the performance and great addons.
sljkdjaldjo 10y ago
well, it's an editor for programming. those tools are usually all about typing text, automatically completing text, and validating text. appling those idea to a json config file shouldn't be allien to a programmer.
- alkonaut 10y ago
  I use fancy autocompleting and validating text editor for exactly that reason - remembering if it's "on" or "true" or "yes" is too much overhead. So yeah, json or (preferably) any other markup for settings is fine so long as it hints me with possible values as I type, tooltips each variable with its meaning and so on.
  - greggyb 10y ago
    > so long as it hints me with possible values as I type, tooltips each variable with its meaning and so on. VSCode does this and more. See sibling comments.
david-given 10y ago
Take another look. What you get now is still a gigantic JSON file... except it opens in a two-pane window, with the default settings (including detailed documentation in comments) on the left, and your local copy on the right. And beside each setting on the left is an icon where, if you press it, it copies the setting into your local copy, with all the correct JSON syntax. And usually there's a dropdown showing the different valid options and it uses folding to divide neatly up into sections. Oh, and the settings instantly apply when you save the file. To me, this combines the best parts of being a text file --- standard commands, formatting the way you like it, you can search it, version controllable --- with the best parts of a GUI --- prompting as to what options are available, easy selection of alternates, documentation, etc. It's an amazingly good implementation and I wish more applications used it. (e.g. the comment for editor.lineNumbers now tells me that valid options are 'on', 'off' and 'relative', which counts relative to the line the cursor is on.)
- nikcub 10y ago
  Two things to add: The settings files now have intellisense in them so you don't have to lookup each option. You can also have a separate settings.json file for that project and check it into git inside the .vscode folder and make those same settings available to your entire team. We use that in every project and it is great.
whatever_dude 10y ago
> I'd much rather have a nice UI to deal with settings than have to figure out that, say, in order to show line numbers I have to modify "editor.lineNumbers" and set it to "on" (or is it "true"? or 1? I can't remember... let me go waste more time looking it up...) Maybe you've taken a look at it a while ago. It's still a big json file (great! everything at hand) but very easy to edit since it provides a lot of assistance: there's icons to set a new option, references for everything, and intellisense/autocompletion for the schema of every option you want to change. It'll even show invalid options with a squiggle (e.g. when some setting becomes deprecated). IMO it's the best way to have settings in an app, especially when you can install extensions that adds settings of their own or when you want settings to be version-controllable.

mastax 10y ago

While I agree that a real settings menu could be an improvement, they have made the settings experience better. They show a searchable annotated list of all the default settings on the left, and when you type a setting key in on the right it will show suggestions for possible values. Looking at it just now, I also see that they added categories, and little edit buttons when you hover over a setting which allow you to click on what option you want. It's a bit strange to me that they're slowly turning a config file into a settings interface, but I guess it works fine for a Developer-focused product.

joekrill 10y ago
Well that's good to know -- in that case I'll give it another shot.

majkinetor 10y ago

This is preciselly the reason I and many of my collegues love it - no GUI for settings. This means you can use hundreeds of tools to manage your settings and it is in true spirit of unix philosophy to keep everything as a text file. Much more time is wasted by looking for options in GUI equivalent and reproducibility, sharing, backup and comparing (diff) are way harder or nonexistent. Creating frontend for it is trivial, but honestly, why drop from horse to donkey as they say. All the apps should have settings like that.

vvanders 10y ago
Seriously, Ctrl+Shift+P and start typing gets me to what I need 99% of the time, it's glorious. Combined with the VIM plugin and I rarely need to touch the mouse.
- majkinetor 10y ago
  I didn't try vim plugin but in general, no vim plugin is substitute for vim.
  - AsyncAwait 10y ago
    If you mostly just want the memorized shortcuts to work, they tend to work OK in VSCode, Atom, IntelliJ and even Emacs - Spacemacs is even a better ViM for some.
    - emidln 10y ago
      As someone who did a fair amount of hacking in vimL, evil-mode is a drastically improved vim. It gets basically everything right, out of the box, and extending it isnt nearly as painful as using vimL or interacting with vim's Python API.
      - flukus 10y ago
        > It gets basically everything right, out of the box Custom bindings don't work on the default document. That's a pretty big failure right out of the box. And I still prefer vimL to lisp, it's the php of editor extension languages. It's not great for big plugins but ok great to slap things together quickly.
      - Lio 10y ago
        It doesn't, in my experience, get insert mode shortcuts like C-h right out of the box because it clashes with emacs' help mode functionality.
joekrill 10y ago

titanix2 10y ago

I share your opinion on the settings and command line. While I like it to loads faster than full fledged Visual Studio, in a year or so of using it on Mac OS I still doesn't use even 1% of its features because they are not _discoverable_ at all. Modifying or doing anything beyond text editing require googling. The same apply for using langages extensions beyond syntax coloring. Even Intellisense does not works as expected out of the box so I don't use it.

AsyncAwait 10y ago
> still doesn't use even 1% of its features because they are not _discoverable_ at all. There are now categories in the settings file, a search bar and auto-completion, which should make discovery easier. > The same apply for using langages extensions beyond syntax coloring. Do you mean to say that extensions at https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/VSCode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/VSCode are hard for you to discover or that too much of your required functionality is in extensions? > Even Intellisense does not works as expected out of the box so I don't use it. If you have found a bug, it would be great to report it at https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues

rehemiau 10y ago

How often do you change these settings, though? I choose VSCode for the performance and great addons.

sljkdjaldjo 10y ago

well, it's an editor for programming. those tools are usually all about typing text, automatically completing text, and validating text. appling those idea to a json config file shouldn't be allien to a programmer.

alkonaut 10y ago
I use fancy autocompleting and validating text editor for exactly that reason - remembering if it's "on" or "true" or "yes" is too much overhead. So yeah, json or (preferably) any other markup for settings is fine so long as it hints me with possible values as I type, tooltips each variable with its meaning and so on.
- greggyb 10y ago
  > so long as it hints me with possible values as I type, tooltips each variable with its meaning and so on. VSCode does this and more. See sibling comments.

david-given 10y ago

Take another look. What you get now is still a gigantic JSON file... except it opens in a two-pane window, with the default settings (including detailed documentation in comments) on the left, and your local copy on the right. And beside each setting on the left is an icon where, if you press it, it copies the setting into your local copy, with all the correct JSON syntax. And usually there's a dropdown showing the different valid options and it uses folding to divide neatly up into sections. Oh, and the settings instantly apply when you save the file. To me, this combines the best parts of being a text file --- standard commands, formatting the way you like it, you can search it, version controllable --- with the best parts of a GUI --- prompting as to what options are available, easy selection of alternates, documentation, etc. It's an amazingly good implementation and I wish more applications used it. (e.g. the comment for editor.lineNumbers now tells me that valid options are 'on', 'off' and 'relative', which counts relative to the line the cursor is on.)

nikcub 10y ago
Two things to add: The settings files now have intellisense in them so you don't have to lookup each option. You can also have a separate settings.json file for that project and check it into git inside the .vscode folder and make those same settings available to your entire team. We use that in every project and it is great.

whatever_dude 10y ago

> I'd much rather have a nice UI to deal with settings than have to figure out that, say, in order to show line numbers I have to modify "editor.lineNumbers" and set it to "on" (or is it "true"? or 1? I can't remember... let me go waste more time looking it up...) Maybe you've taken a look at it a while ago. It's still a big json file (great! everything at hand) but very easy to edit since it provides a lot of assistance: there's icons to set a new option, references for everything, and intellisense/autocompletion for the schema of every option you want to change. It'll even show invalid options with a squiggle (e.g. when some setting becomes deprecated). IMO it's the best way to have settings in an app, especially when you can install extensions that adds settings of their own or when you want settings to be version-controllable.