8 ms·

VSCode, and/or Sublime Text have probably saved me a hundred hours I would have spent waiting for Eclipse to start.

save_ferris 7y ago
+1 for VSCode for its configuration portability plugin, settings sync. It’s never been so easy to sync editor changes across my machines, and I’ve only had 1 dependency issue using it in 4 years. No longer having to maintain my vim config and dependencies has been great.
- fbnlsr 7y ago
  I believe Settings Sync is going to be included in the next release of VS Code. Yay! The amount of work Microsoft is putting in this editor is amazing. Last month we got file history, that was the last thing I needed to ditch the Git GUI I had installed.
  - greggman3 7y ago
    I use vscode but it's missing some basic code features for me. The biggest for me is probably keyboard macros, something that's been a basic feature of editors since at least the 80s. Keyboard macros in other editors has saved me 100s of hours. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/4490 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/4490
    - jakear 7y ago
      Curious, what do you think of multi-cursor as a replacement for macros? (I’m on the team)
      - 978e4721a 7y ago
        Multicurors aren't replacement for macros in the same sense as loops aren't replacement for recursion.
        ikurei 7y ago
        That's snappy but not informative at all. What do you miss in multicursor that macros give you? I also prefer vim's macros to multicursors, but I think it ammounts to nothing more than habit and preference. Macros in Vim are going to be much more powerful, with movement commands and selection commands giving yo a more flexible system... I think? Hard to be objective after so many years of Vim.
        ethelward 7y ago
        > What do you miss in multicursor that macros give you? Not OP, but to take a recent example (although it was in Emacs, I'm pretty sure it would work in any advanced editor), I had a macro select the second half of the open file and pipe it through sort and uniq to replace it with each unique line and their number of occurences. That's not doable with multi-cursors; their use cases intersect but don't overlap with macros ones.
        pasabagi 7y ago
        Honest question: when are loops not replacement for recursion? My (admittedly naive) mental model of recursion is basically a loop where you bring your entire stack frame with you (or less, in the case of tail recursion).
      - sokoloff 7y ago
        As an emacs user, I view multi-cursor as suitable for only a subset of macro usage. Macros are inspectable, editable, savable, able to be applied across files, easily used a variable N times. My typical pattern is something like: define it, try it, adjust it, then apply variable times (including “infinite until error”), maybe save 1% of them. That often takes less time to do than it just took me to describe. I use macros probably 25x for every one time I reach for multi-cursors, though to be fair, if I came the other way, I’d probably use multi-cursor more often than currently. (I used macros for 30 years before getting multi-cursors, so if both can do the job, I’ll use a macro.)
        jakear 7y ago
        > Macros are inspectable, editable, savable, able to be applied across files, easily used a variable N times. In my experience with multicursor, I don't need to be able to "inspect" the operation as the act of typing it is inspection in and of itself. Sure they aren't saveable and thus aren't editable (but you admit this is a very rare use case - I can't recall needing that, ofc you often don't know when to want what you don't have). As for applying across a number of files, I recently added an in-editor rendering of workspace search results to VS Code, and I've created an extension that can apply edits to those search results back to the original files. This allows for performing multicursor edits across many files. As for using variable numbers of times, this is again quite trivial with multicursor. I simply select all the instances I need (either all in one go or iteratively), and go from there. I admit there is an art to selecting the right text such that iterative selection works with a single keypress, but once you get the hang of it it becomes pretty natural. (Unless you mean "apply this N times", which again I'm not sure I've ever been in want of)
        sokoloff 7y ago
        The question might boil down to use case. If the use case is “in this file, change all spans with class foo to divs with class bar once ever”, probably both tools will work. If the use case is “every day, download this file from a server and process it using pre-defined text editing commands”, multi-cursor doesn’t help you in any way that I can see. I admit there’s a huge overlap in use, but when someone asks for macros and a product person says “how about multi-cursor instead?” I think it’s fair to raise the cases where someone asking for macros might actually want macros.
    - williamdclt 7y ago
      There's a `macros` extension that's pretty good: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=geddski.macros https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=geddski....
    - tracker1 7y ago
      Yeah, macros might be cool... I've gotten by with mostly using the regex options in string replace, etc... snippets have helped a little, but don't use them much, sometimes they annoy me when they pop in.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Killer features are directory view, integrated terminal, regexp for find/replace... Lately, I'd add the remote ssh and wsl extensions have been insanely useful, but starting code from inside wsl has gotten sluggish since the last vs code update.
PopeDotNinja 7y ago
+1 for Sublime Text for being so darn fast.
murukesh_s 7y ago
Couldn't agree more.. People who say Electron (on which VSCode is running) is bloated and is slow probably haven't worked on full fledged IDEs using Java.. they consume memory in Gigabytes, are slower, at least appear to be slower, despite using native UI and takes a lot longer to open.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Eclipse isn't a particularly good user of Cocoa, is it?
  - zamalek 7y ago
    It does something completely its own (and horrible/slow) on Windows (possibly one of the 6534 equally awful Java UI packages), so I can't imagine it does anything better with iOS.
    - p_l 7y ago
      Eclipse uses SWT, which actually piggybacks on native toolkits, though I don't know if it doesn't go through some ancient version of GTK in the process. AWT/Swing based IntelliJ manages to be much, much faster in comparison.
    - hellofunk 7y ago
      I think you mean macOS.
- luckylion 7y ago
  How often do you open your IDE though? I switched form VSCode to PHPStorm half a year ago, and while it feels a bit slower, the improvements are so unbelievable worth it for me. It does have a taste for memory, but then again, it easily saves me a lot of time each month, so just throwing RAM at it was a no-brainer for me.
  - BrandoElFollito 7y ago
    I use PyCharm and tried several times to such to vscode. I forced myself to only use vscode for 10 days. I was relieved when I switched back to PyCharm. Vscode is nice but still quite far away from some good IDEs.
Zecc 7y ago
And if you need something even lighter, something like a better Notepad is enough. Lightweight text editors are a dime a dozen, but I'm personally a fan of notepad2 / notepad2-mod / notepad3; even if they don't have tabs. Also shout out to LINQPad, for letting me test quick snippets of C# with better visualization than Visual Studio. It's also a better alternative to Sql Server Management Studio for running SQL.
athrowaway3z 7y ago
I finally switched from VSCode/Sublime to Spacemacs about a year ago ( It was my 3rd try switching ). I'm sure this saved me an additional hundred hours.
fxtentacle 7y ago
That seems odd to me. I basically never close my IDE. Sure, I might put the laptop to sleep in between or disconnect from the remote desktop server, but I rarely need the 500 MB that my IDE consumes, so there's little point in every closing it.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Depends on your projects... I don't like to use the same editor for ui/db/api/service that may be related.
- peelle 7y ago
  To each their own. It always fascinates me to hear about Java/.NET environments that massive. Do you only work on 1 project for months at a time? Do you not ever need to reboot into another OS? Is your laptop power efficient? Do you have a separate machine just for Gaming? I mostly program in languages like Ruby & Perl using Vim. Even with my decked out version that has 35 plugins, and some other bells and whistles, I'm on average using 20 MB of RAM. Open/Close is near instantaneous.
g105b 7y ago
It is not fair to compare VSCode/Sublime Text with an IDE. They are very fast at opening, agreed, but they the features that an IDE provide (intelligent code completion, jump to definition, database-aware autocompletion, ANY sort of refactoring capability) easily save me hundreds and hundreds of hours.

+1 for VSCode for its configuration portability plugin, settings sync. It’s never been so easy to sync editor changes across my machines, and I’ve only had 1 dependency issue using it in 4 years. No longer having to maintain my vim config and dependencies has been great.

fbnlsr 7y ago
I believe Settings Sync is going to be included in the next release of VS Code. Yay! The amount of work Microsoft is putting in this editor is amazing. Last month we got file history, that was the last thing I needed to ditch the Git GUI I had installed.
- greggman3 7y ago
  I use vscode but it's missing some basic code features for me. The biggest for me is probably keyboard macros, something that's been a basic feature of editors since at least the 80s. Keyboard macros in other editors has saved me 100s of hours. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/4490 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/4490
  - jakear 7y ago
    Curious, what do you think of multi-cursor as a replacement for macros? (I’m on the team)
    - 978e4721a 7y ago
      Multicurors aren't replacement for macros in the same sense as loops aren't replacement for recursion.
      - ikurei 7y ago
        That's snappy but not informative at all. What do you miss in multicursor that macros give you? I also prefer vim's macros to multicursors, but I think it ammounts to nothing more than habit and preference. Macros in Vim are going to be much more powerful, with movement commands and selection commands giving yo a more flexible system... I think? Hard to be objective after so many years of Vim.
        ethelward 7y ago
        > What do you miss in multicursor that macros give you? Not OP, but to take a recent example (although it was in Emacs, I'm pretty sure it would work in any advanced editor), I had a macro select the second half of the open file and pipe it through sort and uniq to replace it with each unique line and their number of occurences. That's not doable with multi-cursors; their use cases intersect but don't overlap with macros ones.
      - pasabagi 7y ago
        Honest question: when are loops not replacement for recursion? My (admittedly naive) mental model of recursion is basically a loop where you bring your entire stack frame with you (or less, in the case of tail recursion).
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      As an emacs user, I view multi-cursor as suitable for only a subset of macro usage. Macros are inspectable, editable, savable, able to be applied across files, easily used a variable N times. My typical pattern is something like: define it, try it, adjust it, then apply variable times (including “infinite until error”), maybe save 1% of them. That often takes less time to do than it just took me to describe. I use macros probably 25x for every one time I reach for multi-cursors, though to be fair, if I came the other way, I’d probably use multi-cursor more often than currently. (I used macros for 30 years before getting multi-cursors, so if both can do the job, I’ll use a macro.)
      - jakear 7y ago
        > Macros are inspectable, editable, savable, able to be applied across files, easily used a variable N times. In my experience with multicursor, I don't need to be able to "inspect" the operation as the act of typing it is inspection in and of itself. Sure they aren't saveable and thus aren't editable (but you admit this is a very rare use case - I can't recall needing that, ofc you often don't know when to want what you don't have). As for applying across a number of files, I recently added an in-editor rendering of workspace search results to VS Code, and I've created an extension that can apply edits to those search results back to the original files. This allows for performing multicursor edits across many files. As for using variable numbers of times, this is again quite trivial with multicursor. I simply select all the instances I need (either all in one go or iteratively), and go from there. I admit there is an art to selecting the right text such that iterative selection works with a single keypress, but once you get the hang of it it becomes pretty natural. (Unless you mean "apply this N times", which again I'm not sure I've ever been in want of)
        sokoloff 7y ago
        The question might boil down to use case. If the use case is “in this file, change all spans with class foo to divs with class bar once ever”, probably both tools will work. If the use case is “every day, download this file from a server and process it using pre-defined text editing commands”, multi-cursor doesn’t help you in any way that I can see. I admit there’s a huge overlap in use, but when someone asks for macros and a product person says “how about multi-cursor instead?” I think it’s fair to raise the cases where someone asking for macros might actually want macros.
  - williamdclt 7y ago
    There's a `macros` extension that's pretty good: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=geddski.macros https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=geddski....
  - tracker1 7y ago
    Yeah, macros might be cool... I've gotten by with mostly using the regex options in string replace, etc... snippets have helped a little, but don't use them much, sometimes they annoy me when they pop in.
tracker1 7y ago
Killer features are directory view, integrated terminal, regexp for find/replace... Lately, I'd add the remote ssh and wsl extensions have been insanely useful, but starting code from inside wsl has gotten sluggish since the last vs code update.

PopeDotNinja 7y ago

+1 for Sublime Text for being so darn fast.

murukesh_s 7y ago

Couldn't agree more.. People who say Electron (on which VSCode is running) is bloated and is slow probably haven't worked on full fledged IDEs using Java.. they consume memory in Gigabytes, are slower, at least appear to be slower, despite using native UI and takes a lot longer to open.

saagarjha 7y ago
Eclipse isn't a particularly good user of Cocoa, is it?
- zamalek 7y ago
  It does something completely its own (and horrible/slow) on Windows (possibly one of the 6534 equally awful Java UI packages), so I can't imagine it does anything better with iOS.
  - p_l 7y ago
    Eclipse uses SWT, which actually piggybacks on native toolkits, though I don't know if it doesn't go through some ancient version of GTK in the process. AWT/Swing based IntelliJ manages to be much, much faster in comparison.
  - hellofunk 7y ago
    I think you mean macOS.
luckylion 7y ago
How often do you open your IDE though? I switched form VSCode to PHPStorm half a year ago, and while it feels a bit slower, the improvements are so unbelievable worth it for me. It does have a taste for memory, but then again, it easily saves me a lot of time each month, so just throwing RAM at it was a no-brainer for me.
- BrandoElFollito 7y ago
  I use PyCharm and tried several times to such to vscode. I forced myself to only use vscode for 10 days. I was relieved when I switched back to PyCharm. Vscode is nice but still quite far away from some good IDEs.

Zecc 7y ago

And if you need something even lighter, something like a better Notepad is enough. Lightweight text editors are a dime a dozen, but I'm personally a fan of notepad2 / notepad2-mod / notepad3; even if they don't have tabs. Also shout out to LINQPad, for letting me test quick snippets of C# with better visualization than Visual Studio. It's also a better alternative to Sql Server Management Studio for running SQL.

athrowaway3z 7y ago

I finally switched from VSCode/Sublime to Spacemacs about a year ago ( It was my 3rd try switching ). I'm sure this saved me an additional hundred hours.

fxtentacle 7y ago

That seems odd to me. I basically never close my IDE. Sure, I might put the laptop to sleep in between or disconnect from the remote desktop server, but I rarely need the 500 MB that my IDE consumes, so there's little point in every closing it.

tracker1 7y ago
Depends on your projects... I don't like to use the same editor for ui/db/api/service that may be related.
peelle 7y ago
To each their own. It always fascinates me to hear about Java/.NET environments that massive. Do you only work on 1 project for months at a time? Do you not ever need to reboot into another OS? Is your laptop power efficient? Do you have a separate machine just for Gaming? I mostly program in languages like Ruby & Perl using Vim. Even with my decked out version that has 35 plugins, and some other bells and whistles, I'm on average using 20 MB of RAM. Open/Close is near instantaneous.

g105b 7y ago

It is not fair to compare VSCode/Sublime Text with an IDE. They are very fast at opening, agreed, but they the features that an IDE provide (intelligent code completion, jump to definition, database-aware autocompletion, ANY sort of refactoring capability) easily save me hundreds and hundreds of hours.