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If you want a text editor with longevity try vim or emacs. They aren't dependent on the benevolence of a greedy corporation. Over time VSCode _will_ be raided b
by macinjosh 6y ago
If you want a text editor with longevity try vim or emacs. They aren't dependent on the benevolence of a greedy corporation. Over time VSCode _will_ be raided by the bean counters at MS and it will begin to track you, give you ads about MS products, and lock you in to their ecosystem.
I'll never understand why a professional developer would give so much influence over their work to the likes of MS, JetBrains, etc.
Sure vim and emacs aren't the easiest to learn but if you're going to write software for a living it is not worth wasting your time with toys like this.
- zeroxfe 6y agoTwo decades of vim here, and I switched to VS Code. As a "professional developer", it's just nicer to use, and makes me feel way more productive than ever. I definitely wouldn't call it a toy.
- cutler 6y agoIt's not like you have to give up Vim anyway considering the good-enough VSVim plugin gives you most of the Vim basics. Personally I have found JetBrains' Vim plugin to be the best.
- theCodeStig 6y agoI've tried vim support extensively in VSCode, IntelliJ, and Emacs. The vim plugin for VSCode is sorely lacking; particularly with macro support. For my use case, it's unusable. The vim plugin for IntelliJ is slightly better. It's usable, but I still find it lacking. In my experience, the best (by far), is Evil for Emacs.
- cutler 6y agoI think it's unrealistic to expect a plugin to provide macro support.
- macinjosh 6y agoIf you use vim to its utmost a plugin that emulates vim in another editor pales in comparison. It is like learning to play an instrument. Some people stop digging into it when they learn to play a few tunes but the true beauty comes out when you really invest the time into it.
- scruple 6y agoI used VsVim for a number of years and felt the same way. Eventually, I was back in vim full-time (moved on from the projects/team that required Visual Studio). I've spent the last year migrating to neovim. I've spent the last month getting into some C# development and the VS Code neovim integration is very well done. It's not the same, and I will not be switching to VS Code for anything other than this C# work (for the foreseeable future, I just really like neovim...), but it's not an emulation layer (with this plugin the VS Code editor is a neovim instance in the backend) and it doesn't feel like one, either.
- TaupeRanger 6y agoI find comments like this incomprehensible. Are you using a Vim emulator in VS Code? If not, how can you possibly be more productive? People use Vim precisely because it offers a faster more efficient way to write code. What is it about VS Code that makes you more productive?
- cylon13 6y agoNot the parent, but I switched from vim+plugins to vscode+plugins for most development. I absolutely use the vim plugin because I can't stand to edit text without vim keybindings anymore. The reason I switched is that plugins in vim are more of a pain to configure and they are usually less maintained and polished than their vscode equivalents. For example, let's say I'm not set up to program rust at all. In vscode, I just search "rust" in extensions, grab the most popular one, and it sets itself up magically. In vim, my experience was that I would lose a few hours to configuration, and the plugin would still be a little janky. I still use vim as a plain text editor, and every once in a while I need to open a file in vim to do some serious macro editing (macros aren't perfectly supported by the plugin), but for the most part vscode+vimplugin is just nicer to use for day to day development. I should specify that my daily work languages are typescript & c#/unity on linux, but I've also been writing a fair amount of rust lately.
- snarfy 6y agoI use both. If I want to look at a single file I'll use vim. If I want to look at a group of files in a folder I'll use vscode. They are both text editors that support plugins to the point of becoming an ide, but it is far easier to make vscode work as an ide than it is vim, and that's coming from somebody that's been using vim since it's inception.
- BeetleB 6y agoThere are more aspects to productivity than typing efficiency.
- TaupeRanger 6y agoSure - that's why I asked. I haven't seen any explanation for why VSCode is more productive than Vim. I hear about viewing files and folders, but you can do that in Vim very easily with no friction.
- macinjosh 6y agoI regret using the term toy. Please forgive me :) From my perspective I just can't see investing my precious time in a commercial tool.
- globular-toast 6y agoYou should have switched to emacs. You could have kept the vim UI but got all the stuff (and more) that you get in VSCode. Unfortunately the vim -> emacs path is taken by very few due to religious reasons.
- yepthatsreality 6y agoTracking and advertising already happens via telemetry and suggested extensions.[0] However currently you can turn it off. [0] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry
- untog 6y agoI don’t really understand “influence over your work” here. I agree that there’s a possibility MS will add some kind of monetisation I don’t like in the future... at which point I’ll switch editors. But as it is, I’m much faster and efficient using VS Code than I am using Vim. It is in no way a “toy”. And it doesn’t influence my work. It’s a text editor!
- brandonmenc 6y ago> I'll never understand why a professional developer would give so much influence over their work to the likes of MS, JetBrains, etc. To flip it, I'll never understand why a professional developer won't spend a measly hundred bucks on an IDE that has everything set up out of the box. Also, VSCode and IDEA are both open source.
- bryal 6y agoVSCode isn't open source, but VSCodium (which comprises a significant subset of VSCode) is. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24561289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24561289.
- macinjosh 6y ago> Also, VSCode and IDEA are both open source. In both cases its open source like Android is open source. The core code is available but its pretty much useless compared to the commercial version. On top of that it is still owned by a corporation who probably don't have their users interests in mind.
- criddell 6y agoIt's not that hard to learn a new editor and learning new software is something I enjoy. Even if Microsoft does ruin VSCode, who cares? Vim and Emacs will always be there waiting. In the meantime, I'm loving PyCharm for Python, Visual Studio for C++, Sublime Text and Obsidian for Markdown, VSCode for Javascript, etc... Different tools for different jobs.
- michannne 6y agoYou do realize VSCode is open-source?
- mekster 6y agoI'd like to assume you're joking but 20 years of vim doesn't get me anywhere close to the productivity of JetBrains or even VS code on their first years. Vim first of all has its default set so that only very patient people can live with it. So you need to edit the defaults so much to make it slightly more comfortable, and you need to pick plugins that only some work as expected, mostly not updated in years and they add yet more crazy shortcuts no one can remember and still don't work like modern editors do. I only use vim to edit config files on servers but VS code can do that these days, vim is losing a position for me as of late. Glad it invented modal typing but it's as ancient as one would guess.
- macinjosh 6y ago> 20 years of vim doesn't get me anywhere close to the productivity of JetBrains or even VS code on their first years. If that is the case you only scratched the surface of vim.
- mekster 6y agoI think vim is like a rock, so it takes quite an effort to even scratch it then. But even if you use a drill, can vim even become as useful as IntelliJ or VS code? I doubt that.
- johnghanks 6y agolmfao ok boomer
- higerordermap 6y agoI don't understand why a professional programmer sounds like a privacy activist. When they try to lock in, we would know, and someone will fork.