15 ms·

I feel like Visual Studio Code deserves a spot. Its open source, and free. Unlike a lot of the listed editors.

by hilyen 7y ago

tracker1 7y ago
Agreed... I use it pretty much everywhere at this point. Others may load slightly faster, or perform slightly better.. but it's consistent with the best plugin ecosystem of any editor I've used and performs way better than any full on IDE by comparison with a fair share of the features.
sansnomme 7y ago
Indeed, most people seem to forget the dark ages before VS Code. When you were forced to choose between either slow heavy weights like Visual Studio/Intellij (and its relatives PyCharm et alia)/Eclipse that took forever to start up without a SSD drive or fast featureless editors like Sublime Text, Gedit, Notepad++, Vim/Emacs etc. The latter requires tons of plugins and config to get anywhere near the featureset of the former while the former often seem to have way too many knobs hidden behind collapsible panels on the side. Sure, greybeards may dismiss this as "entitled thinking" when in the Good Ol' Days when people only needed ACME with no syntax highlighting or simply Ed. Sure, but you cannot deny the productivity boost of zero-config Intellisense autocompletion that works out of the box. Language Servers that get installed automatically with all it's dependencies etc. when the parent editor plugin is installed. Configuring Emacs was a special kind of hell that required fiddling with PATH variables, jumping between FSF's poorly formatted documentation and the target language tooling. Do not mention its interaction with Python Virtualenvs; it still gives me nightmares. Getting Sublime Text working with stuff like Clojure etc. required tons of fiddling and watching YouTube videos that all differs slightly in methods. Many days were wasted editing Sublime Plugin configs and JSON files. VS Code forced editors like Atom etc. to up their game in performance, features, speed etc. Zero-config language setup and automatic prompting for installing plugins are now the norm thanks to the efforts of the wonderful VS Code team. The Vim plugin in VS Code is also second to none. Also, a shout-out to Sublime Text for kick-starting the lightweight editor revolution in the first place, with it's cross-platform TextMate style interface and its beautiful Monokai UI color scheme. Kudos! And for Lisp users, Light Table and Nightcode deserves praise for helping to modernize Lisp and demolishing Emacs' forced monopoly that turned off so many interested beginners. Well done Chris (and team) and Zach, thank you for bringing fresh blood and perspectives!
- na85 7y ago
  >Configuring Emacs was a special kind of hell. A "good enough" solution in emacs is actually quite easy nowadays using the "use-package" macro.
  - sansnomme 7y ago
    Have they fixed the dependency management issues yet? Last I checked Spacemacs required mirroring all the packages just to get somewhat close to a modern plugin installation experience. Also, those horrendous TLS compromises Emacs' made in the name of "user freedom".
    - ryukafalz 7y ago
      >Last I checked Spacemacs required mirroring all the packages just to get somewhat close to a modern plugin installation experience. Not sure about Spacemacs as I use vanilla Emacs, but assuming you have use-package installed (and MELPA enabled if the package you're looking for is from there), it's just a matter of adding use-package declarations like this to your config: (use-package magit :ensure t)
    - yarrel 7y ago
      Don't use Spacemacs. Problem solved.
    - j88439h84 7y ago
      https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el is really good.
- somecallitblues 7y ago
  After dealing with Microsoft’s subpar effort in porting their apps to Mac you won’t find too many people who will enthusiastically install another MS product on their Mac. Especially one so crucial to their workflow.
  - LaGrange 7y ago
jammygit 7y ago
I personally find it hard to trust vs code due to Microsoft. For example, they snuck telemetry in their last windows 7 “security” update. I realize the community could fork it if they did so, but it’s still a bit weird. Maybe it’s just me
- yulaow 7y ago
  I agree and can understand, and indeed you can find vscodium which is a vscode version stripped down of all telemetry and information gathering tools present in vscode. link: https://vscodium.com/ https://vscodium.com/
  - emmelaich 7y ago
    Nice, it's in homebrew too.
  - h1d 7y ago
    You now trust a random developer instead of MS not to do anything unwanted. Doesn't sound like it's solving anything.
notafraudster 7y ago
I'm surprised that neither VSC nor Atom make it. Unless there's a strong language level alternative (i.e. RStudio for R), those are the first two places I'd point people looking for a code editor on Mac. Granted neither is perfect, but surely if I had a list of ten programming tools, one or both would make it.
- czech 7y ago
  Some people are complaining about VSC not being a _proper_ macOS app, but Affinity Photo and Designer are on the list (and I love all of them; the newest addition to the family, Affinity Designer, is quite… revolutionary) and yet I can cmd+click on the window title and get full folder path [1] in VSC and not in Affinities. Even Sublime Text doesn't allow me to do this. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236
  - saithir 7y ago
    > I can cmd+click on the window title and get full folder path (...) Even Sublime Text doesn't allow me to do this. You mean like this: https://imgur.com/a/0Aqvjs5 https://imgur.com/a/0Aqvjs5 ? It totally does...
    - czech 7y ago
      You're right, Sublime does offer this option. I was probably checking on an unsaved buffer.
guessmyname 7y ago
You can submit any new links on this project at GitHub [1]. [1] https://github.com/good/openweb https://github.com/good/openweb
reaperducer 7y ago
I feel like Visual Studio Code deserves a spot. Its open source, and free Free as in beer, though. Not free as in freedom from being watched. There's a version called VS Codium that removes all of the Microsoft nastiness. I use it for a couple of my projects and it's really nice.
- filmgirlcw 7y ago
  Disclosure: I work at Microsoft but not on the VS Code team. I’m a huge fan of VS Code, however. I’m not going to get into a whole thing about the telemetry in VS Code because I don’t think it will be helpful/productive, but I will point out that anyone who wants to turn telemetry and crash reporting off can do so in the Settings part of VS Code — no need to install a separate app [1]. As that page makes clear, however, individual extensions themselves may have their own telemetry that can be turned on/off in their own settings, assuming the developer has chosen to do that. [1]: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry
  - alasdair_ 7y ago
    Related topic - any idea why every single time I disable telemetry in Windows, it gets re-enabled in the next update no matter how many times I make it clear I don't want it? Also, does VS Code ever do the same thing?
    - filmgirlcw 7y ago
      Absolutely no idea on Windows — but I’ll look into this and see if I can find an answer (which might be difficult because it may depend on your OEM or some other issues). As for Code — it should respect your choice across updates — it’s a line in the settings.json file. If you use an extension like Settings Sync (which uploads the contents of your Settings file and your list of installed extensions to a GitHub gist), you can even insure that option will persist across other installs. If you do a clean install or remove/alter that settings file, you would need to re-enable that, but it should persist.
pcr910303 7y ago
VSC isn't a well-behaving Mac-app. As I said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20440258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20440258, coherent UI is a very important point to users since they can assume that some feature from App X will also work on App Y. This is very prevalent in the macOS Cocoa ecosystem unlike Windows(every app reinvents notifications) or Linux(GTK/Qt/... fragmentation). Hence the importance of Cocoa in macOS apps. (and VSC is electron :-()
- danielparks 7y ago
  Exactly. I tried it for a few weeks and couldn’t stand it. There’s just too much non-Mac UI for a tool that honestly isn’t that powerful. For example, the search and replace is truly awful. I use BBEdit because it’s both consistent and powerful (better search and replace than vim). This is coming from a guy who used a highly customized vim set up as his primary editor for years.
  - pedrogpimenta 7y ago
    Why did you stop using vim?
    - danielparks 7y ago
      The number one reason is that BBEdit’s search and replace is better. I can select text, make it the search pattern, then modify the text and make it the replace pattern. Then I can do a full or partial search and replace without ever opening the Find window. If I want, I can open the Find window and edit either string. The search string will already be properly escaped as a regular expression. vim’s search and replace is just a lot less convenient. Beyond that, BBEdit is a Mac app through and through, so it feels very natural to use.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  And yet a sizable number of Mac users choose to use it.
  - 7y ago

I feel like Visual Studio Code deserves a spot. Its open source, and free. Unlike a lot of the listed editors.

by hilyen 7y ago

I feel like Visual Studio Code deserves a spot. Its open source, and free. Unlike a lot of the listed editors.

Agreed... I use it pretty much everywhere at this point. Others may load slightly faster, or perform slightly better.. but it's consistent with the best plugin ecosystem of any editor I've used and performs way better than any full on IDE by comparison with a fair share of the features.

sansnomme 7y ago

Indeed, most people seem to forget the dark ages before VS Code. When you were forced to choose between either slow heavy weights like Visual Studio/Intellij (and its relatives PyCharm et alia)/Eclipse that took forever to start up without a SSD drive or fast featureless editors like Sublime Text, Gedit, Notepad++, Vim/Emacs etc. The latter requires tons of plugins and config to get anywhere near the featureset of the former while the former often seem to have way too many knobs hidden behind collapsible panels on the side. Sure, greybeards may dismiss this as "entitled thinking" when in the Good Ol' Days when people only needed ACME with no syntax highlighting or simply Ed. Sure, but you cannot deny the productivity boost of zero-config Intellisense autocompletion that works out of the box. Language Servers that get installed automatically with all it's dependencies etc. when the parent editor plugin is installed. Configuring Emacs was a special kind of hell that required fiddling with PATH variables, jumping between FSF's poorly formatted documentation and the target language tooling. Do not mention its interaction with Python Virtualenvs; it still gives me nightmares. Getting Sublime Text working with stuff like Clojure etc. required tons of fiddling and watching YouTube videos that all differs slightly in methods. Many days were wasted editing Sublime Plugin configs and JSON files. VS Code forced editors like Atom etc. to up their game in performance, features, speed etc. Zero-config language setup and automatic prompting for installing plugins are now the norm thanks to the efforts of the wonderful VS Code team. The Vim plugin in VS Code is also second to none. Also, a shout-out to Sublime Text for kick-starting the lightweight editor revolution in the first place, with it's cross-platform TextMate style interface and its beautiful Monokai UI color scheme. Kudos! And for Lisp users, Light Table and Nightcode deserves praise for helping to modernize Lisp and demolishing Emacs' forced monopoly that turned off so many interested beginners. Well done Chris (and team) and Zach, thank you for bringing fresh blood and perspectives!

na85 7y ago
>Configuring Emacs was a special kind of hell. A "good enough" solution in emacs is actually quite easy nowadays using the "use-package" macro.
- sansnomme 7y ago
  Have they fixed the dependency management issues yet? Last I checked Spacemacs required mirroring all the packages just to get somewhat close to a modern plugin installation experience. Also, those horrendous TLS compromises Emacs' made in the name of "user freedom".
  - ryukafalz 7y ago
    >Last I checked Spacemacs required mirroring all the packages just to get somewhat close to a modern plugin installation experience. Not sure about Spacemacs as I use vanilla Emacs, but assuming you have use-package installed (and MELPA enabled if the package you're looking for is from there), it's just a matter of adding use-package declarations like this to your config: (use-package magit :ensure t)
  - yarrel 7y ago
    Don't use Spacemacs. Problem solved.
  - j88439h84 7y ago
    https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el is really good.
somecallitblues 7y ago
After dealing with Microsoft’s subpar effort in porting their apps to Mac you won’t find too many people who will enthusiastically install another MS product on their Mac. Especially one so crucial to their workflow.
- LaGrange 7y ago

jammygit 7y ago

I personally find it hard to trust vs code due to Microsoft. For example, they snuck telemetry in their last windows 7 “security” update. I realize the community could fork it if they did so, but it’s still a bit weird. Maybe it’s just me

yulaow 7y ago
I agree and can understand, and indeed you can find vscodium which is a vscode version stripped down of all telemetry and information gathering tools present in vscode. link: https://vscodium.com/ https://vscodium.com/
- emmelaich 7y ago
  Nice, it's in homebrew too.
- h1d 7y ago
  You now trust a random developer instead of MS not to do anything unwanted. Doesn't sound like it's solving anything.

notafraudster 7y ago

I'm surprised that neither VSC nor Atom make it. Unless there's a strong language level alternative (i.e. RStudio for R), those are the first two places I'd point people looking for a code editor on Mac. Granted neither is perfect, but surely if I had a list of ten programming tools, one or both would make it.

czech 7y ago
Some people are complaining about VSC not being a _proper_ macOS app, but Affinity Photo and Designer are on the list (and I love all of them; the newest addition to the family, Affinity Designer, is quite… revolutionary) and yet I can cmd+click on the window title and get full folder path [1] in VSC and not in Affinities. Even Sublime Text doesn't allow me to do this. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236
- saithir 7y ago
  > I can cmd+click on the window title and get full folder path (...) Even Sublime Text doesn't allow me to do this. You mean like this: https://imgur.com/a/0Aqvjs5 https://imgur.com/a/0Aqvjs5 ? It totally does...
  - czech 7y ago
    You're right, Sublime does offer this option. I was probably checking on an unsaved buffer.

guessmyname 7y ago

You can submit any new links on this project at GitHub [1]. [1] https://github.com/good/openweb https://github.com/good/openweb

reaperducer 7y ago

I feel like Visual Studio Code deserves a spot. Its open source, and free Free as in beer, though. Not free as in freedom from being watched. There's a version called VS Codium that removes all of the Microsoft nastiness. I use it for a couple of my projects and it's really nice.

filmgirlcw 7y ago
Disclosure: I work at Microsoft but not on the VS Code team. I’m a huge fan of VS Code, however. I’m not going to get into a whole thing about the telemetry in VS Code because I don’t think it will be helpful/productive, but I will point out that anyone who wants to turn telemetry and crash reporting off can do so in the Settings part of VS Code — no need to install a separate app [1]. As that page makes clear, however, individual extensions themselves may have their own telemetry that can be turned on/off in their own settings, assuming the developer has chosen to do that. [1]: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  Related topic - any idea why every single time I disable telemetry in Windows, it gets re-enabled in the next update no matter how many times I make it clear I don't want it? Also, does VS Code ever do the same thing?
  - filmgirlcw 7y ago
    Absolutely no idea on Windows — but I’ll look into this and see if I can find an answer (which might be difficult because it may depend on your OEM or some other issues). As for Code — it should respect your choice across updates — it’s a line in the settings.json file. If you use an extension like Settings Sync (which uploads the contents of your Settings file and your list of installed extensions to a GitHub gist), you can even insure that option will persist across other installs. If you do a clean install or remove/alter that settings file, you would need to re-enable that, but it should persist.

pcr910303 7y ago

VSC isn't a well-behaving Mac-app. As I said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20440258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20440258, coherent UI is a very important point to users since they can assume that some feature from App X will also work on App Y. This is very prevalent in the macOS Cocoa ecosystem unlike Windows(every app reinvents notifications) or Linux(GTK/Qt/... fragmentation). Hence the importance of Cocoa in macOS apps. (and VSC is electron :-()

danielparks 7y ago
Exactly. I tried it for a few weeks and couldn’t stand it. There’s just too much non-Mac UI for a tool that honestly isn’t that powerful. For example, the search and replace is truly awful. I use BBEdit because it’s both consistent and powerful (better search and replace than vim). This is coming from a guy who used a highly customized vim set up as his primary editor for years.
- pedrogpimenta 7y ago
  Why did you stop using vim?
  - danielparks 7y ago
    The number one reason is that BBEdit’s search and replace is better. I can select text, make it the search pattern, then modify the text and make it the replace pattern. Then I can do a full or partial search and replace without ever opening the Find window. If I want, I can open the Find window and edit either string. The search string will already be properly escaped as a regular expression. vim’s search and replace is just a lot less convenient. Beyond that, BBEdit is a Mac app through and through, so it feels very natural to use.
ravenstine 7y ago
And yet a sizable number of Mac users choose to use it.
- 7y ago