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I use VS Code every day and it's a great platform, but to claim it's the endgame of editors is one big hyperbole. It's a very opinionated piece of software that

I use VS Code every day and it's a great platform, but to claim it's the endgame of editors is one big hyperbole. It's a very opinionated piece of software that serves lots of popular niches well right now, but I haven't yet been able to find a mix of extensions that makes it a viable replacement for IntelliJ for Scala, to name one example. I'd expect the next uber popular editor to be optimized towards completely different things, though. VS Code is a great all-purpose IDE for enthusiasts and professionals, who are willing and able to dig into pretty complex UIs and complicated concepts. Take the git integration – it frequently breaks (for me), and when it works, it's really very superficial and requires me to really understand what git is doing in the background. Last year I've tried to teach my dad how to use git, so he can put his python robotics projects in GitHub. It's been eye-opening: All the idiosyncracies and complex ideas that I've grown accustomed to over the years, that's one Eiger North Face of a learning curve if all you want to do is get those Python files on GitHub and have some people collaborate with you there. It's also pretty hard to discover functionality in VS Code. It wants to be everything to everyone, so it can't expose functionality in a way that specialized IDEs can – and even those tend to be either messy or sort of cryptic. It's really hard to be effective in any IDE without memorizing dozens of keyboard shortcuts, which isn't a problem for software people, because we either like this, or have grown accustomed to it. I guess that's why the Touchbar is wildly popular outside of software engineering and related disciplines – for apps that support it, it exposes functionality directly and in a context-sensitive manner. Hundreds of millions of people around the world will start programming in this decade as the world is rushing into a future where code is the stuff that most of anything outside pristine wilderness that we ever experience, is at least partially made of or faciliated by, that all social, economic, political activity rests upon. There is no tooling that would be appropriate for this kind of use case – whatever will end up filling that niche, the casual programmer who doesn't want to get deeply involved with software engineering, but get their semi-complex problems solved without tasking a team of SWEs, whatever will do this will have to be a lot cleverer, easier to use, more discoverable, more intuitive – make collaboration feel much more seamless – and still be very powerful. VS Code with its laser focus on the current developer crowd is probably not very well-suited for this.

jakear 6y ago
> It's really hard to be effective in any IDE without memorizing dozens of keyboard shortcuts, Curious if you use the command palette much? It should be a decent replacement for route memorization of keyboard shortcuts: How do I format this document agian? Hm... F1;form;enter done. And git push? F1:gpu;enter. Etc. I work on vs code and am trying to improve this area so all feedback appreciated!
- dividedbyzero 6y ago
  > Curious if you use the command palette much Yes, definitely (I use Cmd-Shift-P a lot, which should be the same thing? I also use Sublime so that shortcut being the same is valuable), but more for things I need to do relatively rarely, as it's an order of magnitude slower than just pressing the respective key combo, plus requires some mindspace (what would I best type to find this?) – so it's not a complete substitute, but still extremely helpful. I'm not sure how I'd manage without. But, say, toggle comment is something I'd rather not do via the command palette, though, too slow and cumbersome, breaks my focus. It's not that great for discovering functionality, either ("autoformat" doesn't work, but might be the first search term I think of, etc.) – but it really helps with all the things I know are possible but that I use too rarely to remember a shortcut for. I really like what IntelliJ is doing with the Mac Touchbar – that comes much closer to a substitute for memorizing (some) shortcuts for me. Cursor in a class definition, pressing shift gives me "Rename", "Change Signature", "Move Class", with Cmd pressed I get "Show usages", stuff that's somewhat context-sensitive and actually useful, though there's still lots of room for improvement, lots of useful functionality that isn't exposed that way, there could be more context-sensitivity, but it's a good start. It's something I miss a little when using an external keyboard or VS Code (which doesn't seem to support the touchbar yet). I have to look at the thing of course, but then it's right below the screen, so its not like staring at the keyboard while typing, and being able to "just do" these things without any memorization is nice, a little bit slower than shortcuts, but it doesn't break my focus nearly as much. No idea how one might offer something like this on devices with no touchbar, but I think they're on to something there, especially for people who spend only a small part of their time inside an IDE.
  - 6y ago

jakear 6y ago

> It's really hard to be effective in any IDE without memorizing dozens of keyboard shortcuts, Curious if you use the command palette much? It should be a decent replacement for route memorization of keyboard shortcuts: How do I format this document agian? Hm... F1;form;enter done. And git push? F1:gpu;enter. Etc. I work on vs code and am trying to improve this area so all feedback appreciated!

dividedbyzero 6y ago
> Curious if you use the command palette much Yes, definitely (I use Cmd-Shift-P a lot, which should be the same thing? I also use Sublime so that shortcut being the same is valuable), but more for things I need to do relatively rarely, as it's an order of magnitude slower than just pressing the respective key combo, plus requires some mindspace (what would I best type to find this?) – so it's not a complete substitute, but still extremely helpful. I'm not sure how I'd manage without. But, say, toggle comment is something I'd rather not do via the command palette, though, too slow and cumbersome, breaks my focus. It's not that great for discovering functionality, either ("autoformat" doesn't work, but might be the first search term I think of, etc.) – but it really helps with all the things I know are possible but that I use too rarely to remember a shortcut for. I really like what IntelliJ is doing with the Mac Touchbar – that comes much closer to a substitute for memorizing (some) shortcuts for me. Cursor in a class definition, pressing shift gives me "Rename", "Change Signature", "Move Class", with Cmd pressed I get "Show usages", stuff that's somewhat context-sensitive and actually useful, though there's still lots of room for improvement, lots of useful functionality that isn't exposed that way, there could be more context-sensitivity, but it's a good start. It's something I miss a little when using an external keyboard or VS Code (which doesn't seem to support the touchbar yet). I have to look at the thing of course, but then it's right below the screen, so its not like staring at the keyboard while typing, and being able to "just do" these things without any memorization is nice, a little bit slower than shortcuts, but it doesn't break my focus nearly as much. No idea how one might offer something like this on devices with no touchbar, but I think they're on to something there, especially for people who spend only a small part of their time inside an IDE.
- 6y ago